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Five years ago today, US authorities announced that Volkswagen had committed emissions fraud. Dieselgate began. As a journalist, I closely followed the 2016 European Parliament inquiry into the scandal – which concluded that maladministration allowed the cheating to happen – and wrote a book about it. I look at what happened since in a series of short blog posts.

Car companies used defeat device to pass emissions tests when their diesel cars were in fact much dirtier in normal driving conditions. But they may have even been doing more than that. Following inspections in October 2017 at the offices of Audi, BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen, the European Commission reached the “preliminary view” that these companies “have breached EU antitrust rules from 2006 to 2014 by colluding to restrict competition on the development of technology to clean the emissions of petrol and diesel passenger cars”.

Basically, that they were a cartel. Doorgaan met lezen “#Dieselgate: remember when BMW, Daimler, and VW were accused of being a cartel?”

Five years ago today, US authorities announced that Volkswagen had committed emissions fraud. Dieselgate began. As a journalist, I closely followed the 2016 European Parliament inquiry into the scandal – which concluded that maladministration allowed the cheating to happen – and wrote a book about it. I look at what happened since in a series of blog posts.

The use of defeat devices has been banned in EU law for years. The ban was reaffirmed in a 2007 EU regulation, which also said that member states should make sure there was a “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” sanction on using them (if you really want to look it up, it’s article 13 of Regulation (EC) No 715/2007). Each EU member state was supposed to tell the Commission by 2 January 2009.

None did by that deadline. Many didn’t for many years since that.

Doorgaan met lezen “#Dieselgate: Four EU states respect deadline on penalties (already better than last time)”

Five years ago today, US authorities announced that Volkswagen had committed emissions fraud. Dieselgate began. As a journalist, I closely followed the 2016 European Parliament inquiry into the scandal – which concluded that maladministration allowed the cheating to happen – and wrote a book about it. I look at what happened since in a series of blog posts.

In 2016, the European Parliament began a parliamentary inquiry into the emissions scandal (called EMIS) that started with Volkswagen but soon spilled over to other car companies. In its final report, adopted 2 March 2017, the European Parliament concluded that there were several accounts of ‘maladministration’ by the European Commission and EU member states’ national governments. How have they responded to those damning conclusions?

Doorgaan met lezen “#Dieselgate: Challenge! Can you find the official response to the inquiry report?”