“Serial wrongdoing”

Germany’s car industry “keeps falling deeper into the hole that it is digging for itself” two years after the dieselgate scandal broke, Carsten Knop writes in a commentary for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Germany’s “poster industry” is not only badly prepared for the shift from the combustion engine to alternative technologies, but is also gambling away its reputation by “having a new scandal revealed every other week”, Knop argues. The industry has committed “serial wrongdoing” but now needed to make a “radical change of strategy” and come clean with the public, he writes. “There’s nothing wrong with cartels that are intended to achieve technological progress,” Knop says, “but if progress is obstructed and competition among suppliers is prevented, the sanctions need to be severe.”

Read the commentary in German here.