During these meeting and for more than five years, car manufacturers worked together to avoid competing with each other by going beyond what was required by the exhaust gas cleaning legislation, although that the necessary technology was available. The reproach therefore does not lie in the non-compliance with the applicable emission regulations. It is something quite different that is at the heart of the condemnation: the commission considers that the technology Buy Bulk SMS Service vailable to the manufacturers would have enabled them to do better than the regulations applicable under normal conditions of competition. This would obviously have had an impact on the market because the car buyer has become very sensitive to the issue of polluting emissions. Instead of doing their utmost to create cleaner cars, as they had the technological possibility of doing, the manufacturers would have agreed to reduce their ambitions and simply align themselves with the applicable regulations.
For the Commission this results in a “restriction of competition between manufacturers on product characteristics which are important for consumers. » In her communication, Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President of the Commission in charge of competition policy, very rightly explains that: “ Today's decision is therefore about how legitimate technical cooperation went wrong. » For her, the five automakers Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche had the technology to reduce harmful emissions beyond what was legally required by EU emission standards. But they avoided competing with each other by not using the full potential of this technology to go further than the legally prescribed level of purification. And the agreement between companies is intolerable for us.