Somewhere, among hundreds of thousands of Volkswagen and Audi vehicles that were bought back by the automaker under terms of the diesel emissions scandal settlement, at least 69 have gone astray. The cars were supposed to have been stored in the parking lot of the abandoned Pontiac Silverdome football stadium in Michigan with thousands of others awaiting an emissions fix. Instead of sitting near the former home of the NFL Detroit Lions, these TDI-badged cars wound up with fake Michigan titles, parked near a used-car dealer in Kentucky and at a wholesale auction in Indiana. At least one even made its way to a consumer. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan is trying to figure out how this happened.
“It’s still kind of a work in progress to determine whether they were taken from the lot [at the Silverdome],” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard told Car and Driver. “Did they even make it to the lot in the first place" Was there inside involvement"” In other words, the idea that the cars were lifted at some point in the buyback process, rather than having been stolen directly from the Pontiac lot, is an angle police are at least considering. The sheriff’s office also is trying to determine how the fraudulent titles were created. “It’s just a complex situation,” Bouchard said.
Volkswagen had first approached a sheriff’s substation in the county seat of Pontiac and said that it suspected ni...