The pollutants generated by the latest diesel engines are harmful to health, contrary to what many people think and what the industry says. Transport & Environment has rigorously analysed two cars that go beyond the European Union’s most recent control tests, equipped with filters that must capture the particles spilled by diesel combustion. Nor do they meet the stated objective: they multiply admissible pollution by 1,000 emissions into the air.

New diesels, new problems (if they are new diesel, new problems, Spanish and French versions) shows how it is possible that theoretically much cleaner cars, which meet the Euro 6d-temp standard, give such poor results. The key is in the filters themselves, which are the best. These cars carry a filter for the cleaning of spilled fumes, and they almost always do their job -- except that filters don't get clogged when they have to be washed at intervals.

Transport & Environment has demonstrated with the two best-selling cars that comply with EU regulations – Nissan Qashqai and Opel/VauxhallAstra – how the new standard works not in the laboratory but in real life conditions and have realised that this filter cleaning operation is automatically underway along the 450-500 km, touches in the rural area, on the freeway or in the city centre. Although it is called eufemismoz regenerate, for 15 kilometers the filters are limited to themselves in that self-cleaning operation that takes place in the atmosphere much more particles and poisons than in a whole supposed orderly march.

Currently, there are 45 million passenger cars carrying these filters throughout Europe and it is estimated that each year they carry out more than 1.3 billion regenerative cleanings. As the reader will see, we are talking about cars that can enter the low-emission areas that the authorities have imposed in London and in the big cities, as in Barcelona in recent times.

We will have to look at the echo of the scandal that the Transport & Environment report has launched, at the moment the main media have not seen the light, except for a newspaper such as La Vanguardia. But it basically shows that the industry’s lobbying work makes the authorities organise pollution regulations in such a way that fraud is made legally. The famous case of Dieselgate erupted when Volkswaten (and later it was known that he had installed in his cars a software to falsify pollution data), but the scandal went further: The EU authorities were allowed to control these cars in conditions other than those of the actual daily march.

Transport & Environment has now shown that EU legislation has allowed industrialists a hole to continue to pollute new cars, with the same trick as before: it does not control and cannot take into account the car downloads every 450-500 kilometres in the area where they clean their filters. If you look carefully, it is the same trick that the authorities leave to incinerators burning waste: in addition to the industry controlling itself, it is allowed to release the pollutants without filters, bypassing filters. Always filters for all possible problems and always filter fraud.

We are on the verge of the new version of Dieselgate 2.0.