“Mini-consensus for the diesel”

The federal government will demand at the diesel summit on Wednesday that German carmakers pay for software updates for Euro-5 and Euro-6 diesel cars, according to the draft for the final summit statement, reports Daniel Delhaes in Handelsblatt. It will also call for carmakers to finance half of a 500 million euro mobility fund to support intelligent transport solutions. The technical and financial feasibility of additional hardware retrofitting would be examined by a new working group and the carmakers. The mobility fund would not be used for retrofitting diesel cars, but instead finance for example better traffic control systems, or the acquisition of electric buses and taxis, writes Delhaes. The final statement draft says that “combustion engines will continue to be necessary for individual mobility and freight transport for the foreseeable future”. Details will be debated in several working groups over the coming weeks and months, writes Delhaes.

Read the article (behind paywall) in German here and read a Bloomberg article on the topic in English here.

For background, read the CLEW article Why the German diesel summit matters for climate and energy, and the timeline of Germany's car emissions fraud scandal.