European car makers to face ‘Dieselgate’ 2

European Union car makers may be submitting “inflated” figures for their vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions to soften future targets for reducing the greenhouse gas, European Commission documents seen by AFP yesterday show.

Authorities are switching over from an older emissions testing procedure known as NEDC to a new one – WLTP.

During the changeover, “emission values officially declared by manufacturers may be inflated”, commission officials wrote to senior members of the European Parliament’s environment committee and EU Council president Austria.

Declaring higher emissions values now “would cause an increase of the 2021 WLTP targets ... the targets for 2025 and 2030 would also be weakened,” the officials explained.

Although the European car industry could well do without a new emissions outrage, the latest allegations differ from the “dieselgate” scandal rocking the sector since 2015.

In that case, Volkswagen admitted to manipulating millions of cars to appear to emit less harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) in lab tests than they were in real on-road driving.

Other manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler are under suspicion.

The commission now alleges manufacturers are cheating in two ways to undermine its target of reducing CO2 output 15 per cent by 2025 and 30 per cent by 2030.

First, they are declaring emissions of CO2 on average 4.5 per cent higher than actually measured values, with reporting for some models as much as 13 per cent higher than measurements.

Secondly, officials saw evidence manufacturers are configuring vehicles differently for the tests, aiming to maximise emissions on the new test – softening future targets – while minimising them on the older regime.

Contacted by AFP, German car maker BMW said the Federation of the Automotive Industry says “German car makers are doing everything they can” to reduce emissions to 95 grammes of CO2 per kilometre by 2021.