German prosecutors raid Opel over diesel allegations
Amazon’s Bezos to invest in Blue Origin
FRENCH-owned carmaker Opel became the latest household name of the German auto industry to find itself in the spotlight over diesel emissions as authorities raided two factories and filed rigging charges against the company.
Federal transport authority KBA accused Opel of “selling cars with manipulated exhaust control software”, said senior prosecutor Nadja Niesen.
She added that across Europe, around 95,000 cars were under suspicion.
For its part, Opel acknowledged in a statement there were “preliminary proceedings on emissions” with searches at its factories in Ruesselsheim and Kaiserslautern.
It added that it was “fully cooperating with the authorities” and “reaffirms that its vehicles comply with the applicable regulations”.
Tracing its roots back more than 150 years, Opel was bought last year along with British subsidiary Vauxhall by Peugeot maker PSA after decades under US-based General Motors.
It was until recently one of the few corners of the mighty German auto industry relatively untouched by “dieselgate”.
The scandal followed Volkswagen’s 2015 admission to fitting 11 million cars worldwide with software – socalled “defeat devices” – to make cars appear less polluting in lab tests than in real on-road driving.
In a statement, Volkswagen said highend manufacturer Audi had agreed to pay an 800-million-euro ($927 million) fine issued by Munich prosecutors.
In their own communique, Munich prosecutors confirmed their so-called “administrative proceeding” against Audi was now “closed”.
Software allowed vehicles to appear to meet emissions rules under lab conditions, while in fact spewing many times more harmful gases like nitrogen oxides (NOx) on the road.
The transport ministry in Berlin announced in July that it would question Opel relating to three models meeting the latest “Euro 6” emissions standards.
In a statement on Monday, ministry officials said they would soon issue an official recall for the models – the Cascada, Insignia and Zafira – which it discovered were fitted with a defeat device.
Opel had managed to “constantly delay the recall hearing with technical arguments”, they added.
The company issued a second statement on Monday saying that more than 22,000 of the cars had been “updated in the course of (a) voluntary service action”, leaving fewer than 9,200 subject to a recall.
The ministry further said Opel had been slow to carry out software updates it ordered to fix four defeat de- vices found in older vehicles at the end of 2015.
Opel insisted that it had “made every effort to implement the service updates promptly”, adding that it could not start earlier “because the required approval of the KBA had not been issued earlier”.
German car industry stalwarts like BMW and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler have long since become the targets of official probes relating to the ever-widening “dieselgate” scandal that began with VW.
In Europe, car firms have escaped the swingeing costs for fines, buybacks and compensation – 27 billion euros ($31 billion) so far – that the Wolfsburgbased group has paid out in the US.
But managers and executives at the sprawling Volkswagen empire – up to and including former chief executive Martin Winterkorn – have been targeted with court cases for withholding information from investors, fraud and false advertising over the emissions affair.
At subsidiary Audi, former chief executive Rupert Stadler recently quit his post after months spent in custody, which prosecutors said was necessary to stop him influencing witnesses.
The auto industry as a whole is fighting a rearguard action against tougher European regulations on harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other emissions from diesel vehicles, as well as outright bans for older models from some German city centres. BEZOS – whose real-time net worth was estimated at $145 billion by Forbes, in large part thanks to his shares in Amazon – said he had spent about a billion dollars a year on developing Blue Origin.
“Next year, it’ll be a little more – I just got that news from the team, recently,” Bezos said at the Wired 25th anniversary summit in San Francisco. “I always say yes – I’m, like, the worst.”
Blue Origin is working on space tourism, and developing rockets for satellite launches and space exploration, much like its rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Blue Origin space exploration project landed a major deal on September 28 to provide engines for a next-generation rocket being built by a major US launch services contractor.
SpaceX, however, is ahead, having been operational in the rocket race for six years already.
In addition to his position as Amazon CEO, Bezos also owns the Washington Post.
“We need the same dynamism in space that we’ve seen online over the last 25 years,” he explained, saying he wanted to help launch a new age in space exploration. “We can do that – we need reusable space vehicles.”
Blue Origin’s stated goal, much like SpaceX, is to lower the cost of space launches, as the next logical innovation following the work of US space agency NASA, the Soviet Union and others.
Those Golden Era space programs used rockets that were destroyed upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Blue Origin and SpaceX are developing recyclable rockets.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket – named for pioneering astronaut John Glenn – is not expected to be ready before 2021.
The smaller New Shepard – named for Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space – is designed to take six passengers past the so-called Karman line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, to experience weightlessness.
Several key tests carried out this year were a success, and it could be ready next year, Bezos says. In the space tourism game, Blue Origin is competing with Virgin Galactic.
“I keep telling the team – it’s not a race,” Bezos said. “I want this to be the safest space vehicle in the history of space vehicles.”