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German Regulator KBA Gets Sued By Environmental Lobby Group Over Dieselgate

Germany’s motor authority, the KBA, has been sued by the environmental group named Deutsche Umwelthilfe over its reaction regarding Volkswagen’s emissions scandal.
Volkswagen Passat TDI engine bay 6 photos
Photo: Volkswagen
TDI turbo diesel engineTDI turbo diesel engineTDI turbo diesel engineTDI turbo diesel engineTDI turbo diesel engine
The plaintiffs, in this case, accuse the defendants of “failing to act robustly enough” on the entire diesel emissions scandal in which the Volkswagen Group got entangled. Some versions of Volkswagen Group’s diesel engines have already received the KBA’s approval on the proposed repairs, which include software and hardware modifications.

The suit also claims that the changes approved by the KBA to Volkswagen’s TDI engines to respect emissions norms, mentioned above, are not legal.

Plaintiffs motivate the statement through the fact removing the illegal software from the ECUs involves something that “was not mentioned” when the original approval for these vehicles was provided.

If you ask us, this does not make sense, because the entire point of the emissions cheat was not to be discovered by authorities, so nobody could have approved it because it was not detected.

Both Volkswagen and the KBA refused to comment the report regarding the lawsuit filed against the latter, Automotive News reports. The suit was filed in an administrative court in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where the transport authority is based.

The sanctions applied against Volkswagen in Europe are notably lower than the penalties it faced in the USA and South Korea, for example. We think that this would have been a point that the environmentalist group could have made. Instead, the reaction of the KBA is criticized, but we cannot complain about the latter issue.

Germany
is not the only European nation where organizations have made statements against Volkswagen’s diesel emissions scandal, and we believe several other agencies in other countries will act in a similar manner.

At the end of the day, the Volkswagen Group admitted to using a device to cheat in emissions tests, and it did it for about 11 million vehicles sold across the world.
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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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