Mueller starts damage control as new VW CEO

Berlin

VOLKSWAGEN'S new boss began trying to pull the embattled carmaker out of the wreckage of a pollution test rigging scandal last Saturday, as the US and Switzerland halted the sale of the group's new diesel cars.

The 62-year-old former Porsche chief Matthias Mueller was tapped last Friday to replace Martin Winterkorn, who resigned over stunning revelations by US environmental authorities that the German carmaker had fitted some of its diesel cars with software capable of cheating environmental tests.

"Europe's most important automobile group faces a new beginning" while "the scandal is growing bigger and bigger", German FAZ daily wrote on Saturday.

The scale of VW's deception became clear when the company admitted that 11 million of its diesel cars are equipped with so-called defeat devices that covertly turn off pollution controls when the car is being driven normally - a…