Dieselgate campaigners prepare for high court battle

“Little lungs are still paying for Dieselgate every day,” says Jemima Hartshorn, the founder of the Mums for Lungs campaign group.

- Damian Carrington Environment editor

Her own young daughter has suffered serious breathing problems, which at their worst involved the harrowing experience of having to pin her to the floor to administer an inhaler.

It is 10 years since Dieselgate erupted, exposing cars that pumped out far more toxic fumes on the road than when passing regulatory tests in the lab. But the scandal is far from over.

The excess pollution emitted has already killed about 16,000 people in the UK and caused 30,000 cases of asthma in children, experts have estimated. A further 6,000 early deaths will occur in the coming years without action, they say.

That action is taking an “outrageous” amount of time, say lawyers, leaving more than 1m of the dirty diesels still on the road today. Unlike countries such as the US and Germany, the British government has yet to fine any car manufacturer or force them to recall and repair their vehicles. Instead, owners have had to seek justice by mounting the largest group action claim in English legal history, with 1.6 million claimants represented in a high court trial that starts on Monday.

“I want the alleged deception of these manufacturers to be brought into the open and for them to be held to account,” says Adam Kamenetzky, from south London, one of the claimants. When buying a car in 2018 before the birth of his twins, he chose his 2013 Mercedes ML250 specifically because of its low emissions in tests. Now he says he feels he was deceived and was contributing, unknowingly, to deadly air pollution.

Court documents assessed for the Guardian, which the car companies had sought to keep confidential, reveal an extraordinary array of alleged illegal “defeat devices”. These enabled many diesel cars to sail through official tests only for the nitrogen oxides (NOx) in their exhausts to soar when used in real life. Previous reports have shown that most diesel cars sold from 2009 to 2019 emitted more NOx on the roads than in official tests.