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Berlin – Automakers have artificially inflated their baseline CO2 emissions, hoping to eventually have less ambitious targets to meet under the new European standards, confirmed Wednesday the European Commission.
" Evidence emerges that the values (of pollutant emissions) declared officially by the manufacturers could be inflated ", notes the Commission in a research paper sent to AFP by the ICCT (International Council for Clean Transport), the NGO behind the revelations about dieselgate.
These suspicions still taint the reputation of an automobile industry that since 2015 is entangled in the dieselgate. In this scandal, giants of the sector are accused of having concealed the real level of pollution with nitrogen oxides (NOx).
According to the commission's report, builders, never named by the report, claimed this time that some of their vehicles emitted more greenhouse gases than they actually did.
The industrialists would thus try to influence the acceptable level of pollution that will be adopted for 2025 or 2030 under the new globally harmonized measures, called " WLTP ". The higher this level, the less effort they will have to make to reduce them in the medium term.
" The study of the JRC (the center of scientific study of the Commission) shows that there were indeed differences between the declared and measured values ", confirmed Wednesday Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the Commission.
Two European Commissioners Miguel Canete, in charge of actions on the climate of energy, and Elzbieta Bienkowska, in charge of Industry, have alerted Austria, currently President of the EU and the Commission in a letter published on Twitter, but without ever naming any brand in particular.
The German manufacturer Volkswagen, the main fraudster in the dieselgate, ensures Wednesday in a statement have no interest in manipulating this kind of numbers up.
" With an artificial increase in WLTP levels, we would make our vehicles less attractive to our customers ," says the group.
" For Volkswagen brands, it can be excluded that the CO2 values measured in the context of WLTP tests are artificially inflated ", badures a spokesman to AFP.
– Transparency –
Until now, European regulations were based on emission limit volumes (95 grams of CO2 per kilometer).
But following the explosion of the dieselgate scandal, and for the sake of bringing discipline and credibility back to a European automotive sector entangled in embarrbading cheating, the EU decided to regain control of the issue of emission thresholds NOx but also greenhouse gases.
The Commission thus launched in September 2017, as part of its package " Mobility ", a common goal of reducing CO2 emissions, by 30% by 2030, with a goal of intermediary of -15% in 2025.
To set up this system, which is still the subject of negotiations, experts from Brussels ask manufacturers to submit since 2017 their vehicles in the process of being marketed, WLTP tests .
" These test vehicles, once approved, will be put on the market and registered in 2020 and without intervention it will lead to an increase in the WLTP objectives of 2021 ", says the European report. The two European commissioners who launched the alert say they are worried that these skewed rates will in turn affect the objectives that will be set for 2025 and 2030.
And a sign that the last bonds of confidence are waning, the report encourages the European authorities to no longer base, even partially, its calculations on the values declared by the manufacturers.
On the builders' side, these new revelations are considered far-fetched. Asked by AFP, the German BMW badured " do everything possible " to achieve the ambitious goal set by the EU while ensuring compliance with the tools of regulatory measures.
For its part the French PSA ensures to carry out these measurements in " any transparency " under the control of independent third organizations.
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