Ten years ago, on September 18, 2015, the automotive industry changed forever with one 'Notice of Violation’ issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That might sound dry, but it was a bombshell that rapidly shook the entire automotive world.
The EPA notice revealed "irregularities" in the nitrous oxide (NOx) emissions in the emissions tests results of vehicles fitted with certain Volkswagen Group diesel engines – and alleged that undisclosed engine management software had been used since 2009 to essentially cheat the tests.
The initial recall was for 482,000 cars, but the Dieselgate scandal unravelled quickly from there. The Volkswagen Group soon admitted that the ‘defeat device’ had been fitted to around 11 million cars sold worldwide; within days, billions were wiped off the German giant's share price, while chief executive Martin Winterkorn quickly progressed from showing contrition to resigning.
In the following years, the Volkswagen Group spent billions on compensation and fines and numerous members of its staff faced civil and criminal prosecution. But the impact of Dieselgate wasn’t just limited to Volkswagen: it had a profound impact on the whole industry, not least because several other firms have since admitted using cheat devices of their own. And the effects of it are still being felt a decade later.
In the wake of the scandal, car makers – led by Volkswagen – began a pivot towards EVs in an attempt to literally clean up their act. But they soon had cause to: governments and lawmakers, particularly in Europe, decided that the car industry could no longer be trusted. After all, they were the bad guys who couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing.
That led to the increasingly tight CO2 emissions standards and ultimately the measures to phase out the sales of petrol and diesel cars. And while environmental concerns among the public would probably have pushed governments into introducing some requirements on the car industry, measures such as the EU’s current 2035 cut-off for ICE car sales and the UK’s zero-emission vehicle mandate, which also has a 2035 goal, were developed without significant input from manufacturers.
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The effect on me is that I can't effectively use my car any longer in London given all the red routes, massive parking permit charges, LTNs and 20 mph speed l;imits etc. My car is getting old now and when it needs replacing it will be replaced by Uber cabs going forward, I won't be wasting my money on cars again.
NUT Zero is basically committing econimc suicide, and handing over all manufacturing to China
The mistake is for legislators to target or define the solution - they should instead define the problem and the requirements that must be met by the product in order to mitigate the problem, then let the manufacturers come up with solutions that fit.
That's the sensible anglo-saxon approach. Unfortunately the EU (and our useless civil service) are tied to the napoleonic way of trying to control and define everything in minutae.