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VW1

To date, the Volkswagen scandal over diesel emissions (and lying to the California Air Resources Board and the EPA) has mostly been contained to VW and, in a few cases, other brands Volkswagen Group owns like Porsche and Audi. But at present it's possible BMW, an entirely separate company, may have colluded with the various Volkswagen Group brands to fix the toll of diesel emissions systems and other parts.

VW admitted to "possible anti-competitive behavior" in a letter sent to the Federal Cartel Part (Bundeskartellamt) in Federal republic of germany, Reuters, via Der Spiegel, reports. The dare part is responsible for oversight and maintaining fair contest between manufacturers. The discussion "dare" is ofttimes used in the US to refer to drug operations or other negative connotations, but that's not how it'due south sometimes used elsewhere.

"This new chapter in the diesel fuel saga needs to be taken seriously," Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said in a note. "Our decision is that there might exist a adventure of several hundred millions or even low billions."

diesel emissions

To be off-white, researchers accept been charting the vast difference between claimed and bodily diesel pollution records for quite some time.

Der Spiegel reports that "around 200 employees sitting in 60 industry committees discussed vehicle evolution, brakes, petrol and diesel engines, clutches and transmissions as well every bit exhaust treatment systems." The car manufacturers besides apparently agreed to utilize smaller tanks to concur the AdBlue liquid, a critical portion of removing diesel fuel pollution before information technology spews out the tailpipe. They also discussed the price of various components, and which suppliers they were opting to use.

This kind of action, if true, is practically the definition of illegal collusion. Remember well-nigh information technology like this: If you have two options, Supplier A and Supplier B, and the automotive industry collectively agrees to requite ninety percentage of its business to Supplier A, Supplier B is almost certainly going to fail — not because it did anything wrong, merely because some executives from the various companies in question knew and liked Supplier A and had a stronger relationship or personal history with the company.

For a CPU analogy (and for once, a CPU analogy makes sense), role of AMD'southward anti-trust lawsuit confronting Intel involved how AMD had offered HP one million costless processors to use in Athlon 64 systems. HP turned the offer down, because even one one thousand thousand costless fries from AMD wouldn't offset the penalisation they'd take from shipping more AMD hardware and losing their Intel kickback discount on Intel CPUs as a upshot.

News too broke today that the Eu Manufacture Commissioner, Elzbieta Bienkowska, dropped a bomb on VW today, ordering the company to either bring its entire vehicle armada into pollution compliance by the end of the year, or else face the entire decommissioning of its fleet across the whole Eu. From that report, it looks similar VW, Audi, and Porsche have been collectively stalling; it took investigation from public prosecutors to expose the company's fraud.

In the U.s., the VW scandal is mostly considered over. In the EU, on the other hand, it looks like things are just getting started.