The truth about the great diesel scandal has finally been said

Professor Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, has finally said something about the diesel emissions scandal that desperately needed to be said. ‘These companies have blood on their hands – I say that without any doubt’, he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘The number of early fatalities in Britain is really very, very large due to NOx (nitrogen oxides) [in the] air, with governments across Europe encouraging diesel on the basis that the catalyst traps worked’.

So now we know that policies which favoured diesel cars (mostly produced by EU carmakers) over their non-diesel competition (mostly produced by non-EU carmakers) are actually killing people. But how did we get to this sorry outcome? It wasn’t predicted, even by probably the most powerful man in the European car industry. In 2004, Der Spiegel interviewed Volkswagen’s chairman, Bernd Pischetsrieder, who noted that stricter EU emissions limits looked set to destroy the market for diesel family cars.