dieselgate

Daimler, parent company of Mercedes-Benz, has been fined €870 million ($1.4 billion) by German authorities for selling vehicles which did not fully comply with regulations regarding oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions. It's understood roughly 684,000 diesel vehicles sold in Germany were not compliant with emissions regulations.

Dieselgate, when it was revealed Volkswagen was deliberately cheating emissions tests by using a defeat device, hit the company hard in 2015. It was this saga that drove Volkswagen to clean up its act, and plunge billions into its electrification technology.

The Stuttgart prosecutor's office has penalised Porsche €4 million ($6.4 million) for a "negligent breach of duty" relating to its use of diesel engines with emissions-test-cheating software. The rest of the fine – €531 million ($847 million) – comes from a levy calculated from the "economic benefit" the company derived from its illegal activities.

At Volkswagen Group, the next generation of flexible component sets will be the last engineered for internal combustion engines. According to Automotive News, Michael Jost, head of strategy for the Volkswagen brand, told an industry conference in Germany “our colleagues are working on the last platform for vehicles that aren’t CO2 neutral".

German manufacturer Opel has had its Russelsheim and Kaiserslautern operations searched by German prosecutors this week, as part of an investigation into potential emissions cheating with diesel vehicles.