It was an interesting piece by N-TV on the current diesel car crisis in Europe.
The EU Industry Commissioner....Elzbieta Bienkowska....suggests that the EU is reaching a point where they will regulate the diesel car crisis to an end-point....which probably scares the crap out of a number of German car-makers and the German government.
The suggestion in the hyped-up talk is that if VW doesn't carry forward it's solution-repair by the end of 2017....then the EU might ban the affected cars from European roads (affecting not just the diesel vehicles in Germany....but across all of the continent).
The road-block? One gets the impression that that VW and the solution-rocket-scientists.....aren't that confident in their fix-package. If you go and say X-package will get the job done and it costs 1,100 Euro per package....then fine. If you finish the job, and 18 months later discover that the X-package only does 70-percent of the job, and you need a Y-package to wrap up the final 30-percent, and it costs 1,100 Euro....well....that's a heck of a lot of cost that you dig out of profits.
The EU threat?
In 2016, almost half of all new car sales were diesel related around Europe.
If you go by 2015 numbers....Germany has around fifty-percent of it's vehicles running on diesel. Portugal has nearly 70-percent of it's vehicles running on diesel. Norway, nearly 40-percent. Greece, nearly 60-percent.
For the EU to come out and regulate these cars off the road....they'd face a huge backlash with a EU election year coming up in 2019. It would be unwise and provoke a 'throw-the-bums-out' sequence.
So, I'm of the mind that this is most hyped-up talk by the EU in hopes that pushing VW and the other car-makers to cooperate, and get this solution business done. The odds of this starting before the end of 2017? No one says much. You get the impression that it might be 2018 before any work gets started.
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