Hamburg bans older diesels

The northern port of Hamburg has become the first German city to ban older diesel cars from its inner-city streets.

It will ban all pre-EU6 diesels from May 31, taking advantage of a ruling from Germany’s Federal Administrative Court that allows cities to keep the dirtiest diesels off their streets to help clean chronically polluted air.

City authorities posted more than 100 signs last week on the two major roads leading to the historic centre and other critical areas.

Hamburg was the clear leader among a group of German cities trying to ban diesel engines in what was claimed to be a backlash against the Volkswagen Dieselgate emissions-cheating scandal.

Volkswagen itself denies its scandal was the catalyst for the court decision, insisting it was in train a long time before the September 2015 crisis broke.

“The crisis at Volkswagen was really circumstantial [to the diesel debate]. It really was,” Volkswagen’s board member for sales, Jürgen Stackmann, said during the recent Touareg launch.

“The lawsuits that the NGOs had taken to force the cities to take action immediately upon cities with the wrong air pollution level, they tried to do this for years.

“The EU, before we had our crisis, gave a time deadline to Germany for this. It’s just the perfect storm.”

The ban covers all diesel-powered cars with pre-EU6 emission-cleaning technology, even though the newest EU5 cars were built only in 2014.

Stuttgart and Düsseldorf were also given court permission to enact bans on older diesels in specific areas, though they have yet to take direct action.

Several NGOs banded together to take the diesel-emissions matter to court in Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Hamburg to combat repeated breaches of the EU’s airborne NOx safe limits.

More than 70 German cities exceeded the safe number of days above the limit.

So lax was the German government about cleaning up the toxic air in its cities that the European Commission recently announced it was referring Germany and some other member states to the Court of Justice.

It’s no surprise, then, that Germany’s government opposes the ban, and so does Germany’s car industry.

“If you just look at the data, the pollution problem in the cities has come down already. You can see the effects of us changing the software already for two million cars,” Stackmann insisted.

“You can see us scrapping old cars and changing them for new cars -- that’s 160,000 cars off the road. You can see the effect that more and more cars going to EU5 and EU6 naturally.

“If you see any of the real-world emissions, the best is BMW and the next is Volkswagen, with a huge distance to the next competition.