AUTONEWS

Porsche in the sights of German justice

The German federal transport authority, Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA), said it was investigating Porsche. According to Automotive News, the manufacturer is suspected, this time, of having manipulated gasoline engines - the use of fraudulent software in diesel engines has already been proven in 2019 - in order to circumvent the systems of approval of consumption and respective emissions of dioxide carbon, aiming to announce lower values, with advantages for the builder.
According to what was advanced yesterday, Monday, by a KBA spokesperson, the vehicles concerned before 2017 are intended for sale on the European market. Porsche confirmed the news from a local newspaper, which said that the brand had discovered irregularities during an internal investigation, without specifying which ones, and that it had sent the same data to the authorities - a way of trying to reduce the punishment it will be facing. subject to confirming yet another case of fraudulent software manipulation.
It should be recalled that, as early as 2019, the KBA penalized Porsche by 535 million euros under the Dieselgate case, for trying to trick the regulator by manipulating the diesel engine software. Initially, the manufacturer started by denying any involvement, having even stated that he did not participate in the development of diesel engines, limiting himself to acquiring them from other brands in the group, which proved not to correspond to reality.
This time, the novelty for the KBA is the suspicion that Porsche also manipulated the gasoline engine software, which had not been proven in 2019. The German newspaper Bild am Sunntag claims that the investigation, which started long ago, was focused in vehicles whose engines were developed between 2008 and 2013, installed on models such as the Porsche 911 and Panamera. The newspaper added that the evidence against Porsche was obtained after countless conversations between the authorities and employees and an analysis of the minutes of the internal meetings and hundreds of thousands of emails.
To this the Porsche spokesman replied that the problems related to vehicles developed a few years ago and that there was no evidence to affect the current range. It remains to wait for the KBA's conclusions, with the certainty that this further accusation, to be confirmed, puts Porsche and its CEO, Oliver Blume, in the spotlight and not for the best reasons, pinching the image of the 911, model that it is no longer the one that sells the most, it remains the most emblematic of the manufacturer.
More serious, from the point of view of costs, may be the communication of the findings made by Porsche's internal investigation to the American authorities, according to the German publication Auto Motor und Sport. If confirmed, the heavy hand of the local regulatory authority is known, especially on repeat offenders.