When the US Department of Justice and the EPA announced the details of the settlement with the German automaker Daimler on fraudulent software in hundreds of thousands of diesel cars on Monday evening, there was also a pithy threat. “We will enforce the law. And anyone who tries to cheat or mislead the public will be caught, ”said Andrew Wheeler, who heads the EPA. “Those who violate public confidence in order to make a profit will lose both.”
In the past few years, confidence in Daimler in the United States has indeed suffered. The background to this is the investigation into the automaker that the American authorities opened in the wake of the Volkswagen diesel fraud. The EPA and the Californian environmental authority CARB had found out in tests that Daimler, too, installed unauthorized defeat devices in a good 250,000 Sprinter vans and passenger cars between 2009 and 2016. On the test bench, the cars appeared to meet emission standards that they failed to meet on the road.