Emission testers look to Trump to fuel industry
Opus Group AB’s new boss says the more cars pollute, the more testing is needed
STOCKHOLM— The Swedish vehicle inspector whose technology identified emissions discrepancies in Volkswagen AG diesel engines sees Donald Trump as an opportunity-inwaiting.
While it’s generally “not a good situation for us” when a government is not pro-environment, any decision by the U.S. president to roll back fuelconsumption rules put in place by his predecessor Barack Obama means vehicle manufacturers can “sell gas guzzlers for much longer time periods than previously anticipated,” said Lothar Geilen, who takes the helm at Molndal, Sweden-based Opus Group AB next month.
“The need for emissions-testing programs may actually increase as a result of that, because it will mean there will be a higher polluting vehicle fleet over the next 10 years than originally planned,” the designated chief executive officer said in a March 15 interview. Trump vowed on the same day to reinstate a review of fuel economy and vehicle emissions by spending another year scrutinizing rules that call for companies to cut gasoline consumption to an average of more than 5.6 litres per 100 kilometres by 2025.
When announcing the decision to a crowd of workers in Ypsilanti, Mich., Trump told the CEOs of automakers, including General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, that they needed to reciprocate by adding workers and building plants. Obama’s decision to preserve fuel economy rules “would have destroyed, or further destroyed, the auto industry,” he said at the time.
Opus provides vehicle-emission inspection in the U.S., including remote-sensing services measuring large volumes of vehicles as they drive past on the street. Late in 2014, about a year before VW’s emissions-cheating scandal became public, Opus and a team of scientists discovered that readings for VW and Audi vehicles with two-liter diesel engines were much higher than they should be, according to Opus’s website.
As one of the largest emission-testing companies in the U.S., Opus counts the country as one of its most important markets. The company has a market share of more than 40 per cent in the government-contracted emission-testing business there, handling almost 25 million inspections a year. “The bottom line is that the higher the vehicles’ pollution and the more fuel they consume, the more efficient the emission-testing program is,” Geilen said.
Trump’s pledge means demand in the U.S. will “at least stay the same” rather than decline, which it may have done under Obama’s rules as emissions would then have fallen faster, Geilen said.
While the CEO said he doesn’t know “what exactly Trump has in his pocket,” emission-testing programs are “probably not at the forefront of his concerns.”
“He is more worried about increasing the market position of the U.S. automotive industry, loosening up requirements for industry in terms of environmental requirements,” Geilen said. “All of that will lead to higher emissions and pollution in the country, eventually, and higher pollution will also lead to more demand for pollution-reduction schemes, like emissions-testing programs.”