Guest post by dr Kati Cseres, Associate Professor at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance, University of Amsterdam
On 18 September the European Commission has announced
that it has opened an investigation against BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen,
Audi and Porsche from the VW group, based on information that they had colluded, in breach of EU
competition rules, to avoid competition on the development and roll-out of
technology to clean the emissions of petrol and diesel passenger cars.
EU Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, in charge of the competition policy
portfolio, said: "The
Commission is investigating whether BMW, Daimler and VW agreed not to compete
against each other on the development and roll-out of important systems to
reduce harmful emissions from petrol and diesel passenger cars. These
technologies aim at making passenger cars less damaging to the environment. If
proven, this collusion may have denied consumers the opportunity to buy less
polluting cars, despite the technology being available to the
manufacturers."
The Commission's
investigation focusses on information indicating that BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen,
Audi and Porsche participated in meetings where they discussed inter alia the
development and deployment of technologies to limit harmful car exhaust
emissions. In particular, the Commission is assessing whether the companies
colluded to limit the development and roll-out of certain emissions control
systems for cars sold in the European Economic Area (Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).
While the EU competition rules certainly leave
room for technical cooperation aimed at improving product quality, the
current investigation concerns specific cooperation that is suspected to have
aimed at limiting the technical development or preventing the roll-out of
technical devices. The Commission has, however, stated that at this stage of
the investigation it “has no
indications that the parties coordinated with each other in relation to the use
of illegal defeat devices to cheat regulatory testing”.
The Commission’s statement and
act comes three years after the Dieselgate scandal started with a violation notice issued by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the VW
group revealing that “defeat devices”, meant to game emissions testing, had
been fitted to nearly half a million cars.
EU Commissioner Vera Jourová, responsible for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality has also been actively
pursuing a solution for European consumers by way of legislation and proposing
a New Deal for
consumers as
well as obtaining action plans from Volkswagen.
Should the current investigation of the
Commission,
Vestager’s DG Competition indeed find that Volkswagen group, Daimler
and BMW has colluded on, consumers will have another strong case to bring before
national courts and claim damages for the harm they suffered. At the same time,
this is another strong signal for the other EU institutions that there should
be further hesitation to support an EU wide collective action mechanism which
effectively compensates harmed consumers.
