Despite paying billions of dollars and euros in fines, public and political scrutiny, and suddenly becoming an outright embarrassment, the Dieselgate scandal that plagued the Volkswagen Group beginning in 2015 is apparently still not over, at least for South Korea. According to The Korea Herald, the Asian country has decided to ban domestic sales of eight Audi, Volkswagen, and Porsche diesel vehicles because they violated emissions regulations.

They are as follows: Audi A6 40 TDI Quattro, two Audi A6 50 TDI Quattro models, two Audi A7 50 TDI Quattro models, Volkswagen Touareg V6 3.0 TDI BMT, Volkswagen Touareg 3.0 TDI 4 Motion, and the Porsche Cayenne.

In addition, the country's environmental ministry plans to hit all three with fines as well as proceeding with the prosecution based on its own investigation. As we well know, the VW Group was caught manipulation pollution control devices on several of its oil burners. In short, engineers purposely wrote software code that gave false emissions figures when the system recognized it was being tested by a government agency or any other entity with the right equipment. Interestingly, there really are not too many of these affected vehicles in South Korea.

A total of just 1,261 cars in the eight models are involved, all of which were sold from May 2015 to January of last year. "They were manipulated so that the emission mitigation devices perform at lower levels in driving conditions that are different from those when they were certificated," a ministry official said.

The ministry, however, isn't stopping there. It has plans to cancel import certifications of these specific models. In addition, it will order correction measures. The imposed penalties are estimated to be around $6.5 million for Audi and Volkswagen and another $3.3 million for Porsche. South Korea's investigation into excess diesel emissions began in June 2018 not long after Germany detected falsified emissions control systems in Audis.