At the end of last week, about the same time that news emerged that the Volkswagen Group (Audi, specifically) were launching a worldwide voluntary recall campaign to fix their V6 and V8 diesel engines, journalists were gathering information for their shocking report in Der Spiegel, alleging that in the 1990s the major German auto manufacturers formed a secret cartel to collaboratively work toward a means to surmount the increasingly strict emissions standards.
These carmakers, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz as well as Volkswagen and their subsidiaries Audi and Porsche foresaw the technical and regulatory hurdles that they would soon be facing, discussing “the technology, costs, suppliers, and even the exhaust gas purification of its diesel vehicles.”
The report cites multiple letters disclosed to the German weekly and to competition and anti-trust officials between Volkswagen and Daimler, a kind of self-whistleblowing which detail the correspondence that laid the groundwork for a concerted effort that was exposed in the Dieselgate scandal that broke in 2015, in which VW was caught using hidden software to fool emissions testing equipment to pass pollution regulation, and is one of the costliest exposures of corporate misconduct in history.
Specifically, these secret meetings involved the implementation of AdBlue tanks (a urea mixture that the diesel fumes would run through before being expelled from the exhaust, reducing its nitrogen oxide and other harmful substance content).
While this would be a serviceable long term solution, the tanks required to filter out the necessary amount of nitrogen oxide over a car’s typical lifetime would need to be large, requiring more effort to package within the vehicle as well as more expensive to source and implement. Therefore, the ‘cartel’ of automakers agreed to use small tanks despite knowing that before long, the AdBlue’s filtration ability would be depleted, only being effective in the short years after the car is made.
Over the weekend, antitrust regulators for the European Union have said they are also actively investigating these allegations of an automotive cartel operating since the 1990s, and could soon result in an anvil of fines and other legal measures imposed on the companies involved.
The AFP tried to extract comment from the spokespeople of multiple automakers, but one such representative of Volkswagen declined a statement request on the grounds of these reports still being “speculation and conjecture”. Meanwhile, Daimler has refused to comment out right and BMW has denied the legitimacy of these claims.
