Showdown between Andreas Scheuer and Dieter Zetsche: The Minister of Transport has summoned the Daimler boss for this Monday. According to SPIEGEL information, the car company wants to outsmart the policy with an offer.
Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche end of May in Berlin
Monday, 11.06.2018
06:36 clock
Once again, the Daimler boss will have no choice but to walk through a trellis of cameramen and journalists. On this Monday afternoon Dieter Zetsche is summoned to the Federal Ministry of Transport, and like last time, the landlord Andreas Scheuer (CSU) will not spare him the gauntlet. Scheuer needs the pictures of the humiliated Autobosses. He wants to use the occasion to demonstrate authority.
Because the scandal around manipulated diesel vehicles at Daimler takes on such great proportions that he could potentially not only be sufficient to overthrow the Daimler CEO, but also to damage the career of the young political talent Scheuer.
The CSU man is well advised to drive a hard line. According to SPIEGEL information, Zetsche and his people intend to pull the government representative over the table.
Authors want to offer to the minister obviously, in addition to the van Vito, for which the Ministry already has one official recall had imposedto call back a few thousand other vehicles in the workshops. This software functions are to be deleted, which holds the Federal Motor Transport Authority for illegal defeat devices – and which are responsible for the fact that the cars in the traffic emit significantly more nitrogen oxides than allowed.
In the past week, Zetsche emissaries, including Daimler chief lobbyist Eckart von Klaeden, have previously made a corresponding offer to officials in the ministry. At first, the offer sounds good: it would affect tens of thousands of cars, including the already suspected C-Class, but also S-Class cars, such as the “Bild am Sonntag” reported,
But the officials were amazed at the models suggested by Zetsche’s people. There were cars underneath that the auditors had not suspected so far because they simply had not got around to controlling them for scams. But missing for series such as the GLC and parts of the C-class fleet, where the state supervisors are very sure that they are illegal. In a hurry, the officials began to calculate, and they came to dizzying numbers.
Minister Scheuer should now dawn on how dangerous the affair is
If it is true that other model series are affected, then the total number of affected cars is much higher than previously discussed. It then reaches the million mark, and thus orders of magnitude reminiscent of the VW scandal.
Obviously therefore contains the Daimler offer according to SPIEGEL information conditions that make the thing for scouring particularly tricky: One would like to accept the callbacks in the Vito and the other reported models only, so Daimler should have proposed, in return, the KBA the company is not further bothered with exams. So, apparently, Daimler wants a kind of amnesty.
And to get them, the managers have come up with yet another bait that they hope scouring bites. Daimler wants to make a voluntary recall on the van model Sprinter and make a software update. 250,000 vehicles would relate to what is known in the ministry: they have catastrophic emissions.
At the request of SPIEGEL, Daimler did not want to comment on the case. It was agreed for the talks “confidentiality,” said a company spokesman.
In view of this poisoned offer, Minister of Transport Scheuer is beginning to dawn on how dangerous the Daimler affair is. And now he’ll understand better what one of the Zetsche lawyers wanted to signal him at his first meeting with the Daimler boss exactly two weeks ago. The lawyer should have warned Scheuer then, if he considered the defeat devices of Daimler as illegal, then he would bring the entire German car industry in danger.
Since the poisoned offer from Daimler is in the room, Scheuer knows: His people have come across with the shutdown functions in the exhaust gas software obviously on a new scam mesh, the dimensions of which could be breathtaking.
For that reason, it would be extremely risky for Scheuer to accept the offer. He could save Zetsche his survival at the head of the group – and plunge himself into the political abyss.