Dieselgate Reaches Daimler: A Defeat Device By Another Name“Defeat device? Cold!” Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche (AP Photo/Frank Augstein,File)
Europe’s auto industry is desperately trying to paint dieselgate as an isolated lapse of judgement by Volkswagen, while Volkswagen is desperately trying to paint dieselgate as the work of a
“couple of engineers” lacking parental supervision. The transparent paint-job has received a huge crack today when Germany’s
Daimler AG was found using the defeat device Daimler’s mustachioed CEO Dieter Zetsche has sworn not to exist.
Except that Daimler doesn’t call it a defeat device.
In tests by Netherland’s official automobile inspector TNO on behalf on the Dutch Minister of the Environment, a C-Class Mercedes C220 TDi BlueTec was found emitting more than 40 times the amount of cancer-causing NOx than in the lab. After Dutch TV picked up the tough to ignore scent, the Stuttgart automaker complained that the tests were done at temperatures below 10 degree centigrade (50 F).
Germany’s Spiegel Magazne writes why:“There is, says Mercedes, a shut-off device in the engine management of its C-Class diesel cars that stops the NOx cleaning under these and other circumstances. This is for the protection of the engine, and permissible, says the Stuttgart automaker.“
A look at the climate stats shows that in Holland, temperatures where the C Class switches off its diesel catalysator are common, except in the heights of summer. In the cool parts of Europe, Daimler’s diesel cars spew unmitigated NOx.
Germany’s pressure group Deutsche Umwelt Hilfe has repeatedly claimed that dieselgate is an industry-wide problem. The group calls Daimler’s stance highly hypocritical. “The engines are being protected, the people aren’t,” the group’s General Manager Jürgen Resch said.
The group now applied at Germany’s automotive regulator Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA) for a withdrawal of the EU-wide type approval for Daimler’s diesel-powered C-Class, convincingly arguing that “even below 10 degrees, the car must comply with the emission standards.” Should the approval be pulled, the cars could neither be sold, nor driven in the EU. The group also demands that diesel-driven C-Class cars are kept out of Germany’s inner cities once the temperature drops below 10 degrees centigrade. One of the cities with the highest NOx concentrations is Daimler’s hometown Stuttgart. Stuttgart’s mayor is a member of the Green Party, so is the prime minister of Stuttgart’s state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Meanwhile, Daimler is swearing up and down that it is innocent:
“A defeat device, i.e. a function that limits the efficacy of the emissions treatment in an inadmissible way, is not being used by
Mercedes-Benz . Furthermore, Mercedes-Benz vehicles do not have a function that automatically registers that the vehicle is in a testing bay.”
Observers of this quickly developing scandal are increasingly being sensitized for sophistry: Daimler seems to try to argue that only an inadmissible device is a defeat device, and since they believe that their device is admissible, no defeat device. Daimler’s state-of-the art software no longer needs to detect that the car is on a dynanometer. The prescribed ambient temperature during the
official EU emissions test is 22 degree centigrade, well above the 10 degrees where Daimler shuts its emission treatment off.