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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 independent to VW and, in a few cases, other brands Volkswagen Grouping owns similar Porsche and Audi. Just now it'southward possible BMW, an entirely separate company, may have colluded with the diverse Volkswagen Group brands to fix the cost of diesel emissions systems and other parts.

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

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

diesel emissions

To be fair, researchers accept been charting the vast difference betwixt claimed and bodily diesel pollution records for quite some time.

Der Spiegel reports that "effectually 200 employees sitting in sixty industry committees discussed vehicle development, brakes, petrol and diesel engines, clutches and transmissions as well as frazzle treatment systems." The auto manufacturers besides evidently agreed to use smaller tanks to concord the AdBlue liquid, a critical portion of removing diesel pollution before information technology spews out the tailpipe. They also discussed the toll of diverse components, and which suppliers they were opting to use.

This kind of action, if true, is practically the definition of illegal collusion. Think nigh it like this: If you lot take two options, Supplier A and Supplier B, and the automotive industry collectively agrees to give 90 percent of its business to Supplier A, Supplier B is nearly certainly going to fail — non because it did annihilation wrong, but because some executives from the diverse 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), part of AMD's anti-trust lawsuit against Intel involved how AMD had offered HP one 1000000 free processors to employ in Athlon 64 systems. HP turned the offer downward, because even one million free chips from AMD wouldn't offset the punishment they'd take from shipping more AMD hardware and losing their Intel kickback disbelieve on Intel CPUs as a effect.

News too bankrupt today that the European union Industry Commissioner, Elzbieta Bienkowska, dropped a flop on VW today, ordering the company to either bring its entire vehicle fleet into pollution compliance past the end of the year, or else face the entire decommissioning of its fleet beyond the whole European union. From that study, information technology looks similar VW, Audi, and Porsche take been collectively stalling; it took investigation from public prosecutors to betrayal the company'southward fraud.

In the Usa, the VW scandal is more often than not considered over. In the Eu, on the other paw, it looks like things are just getting started.