Europe makes the car cleaner

Car exhaust gases began to be discussed as a problem in the USA as early as 1943. As from the 1960s, the government tightened the norms – especially in California in 1976. Petrol had to be made lead-free. It was BOSCH, as the inventor of the lambda sensor, that supplied the technological solution for the fulfilment of that exhaust norm. In 1976 in the USA, Volvo was the first manufacturer to instal it, and the whole of the industry duly followed.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the dying forest syndrome, which had set in on account of acid rain, nurtured feelings of doom in the Federal Republic. Friedrich Zimmermann (CSU), minister of the interior in the Kohl cabinet, enforced the deployment of the three-way catalytic converter with a lambda sensor in 1984. France and Italy delayed its introduction. They declared the diesel engine to be clean. Diesel, they said, had always been lead-free, and its combustion always much more efficient.

Diesel engines, furthermore, were more economical, and they were Europe's reply to the oil crisis of 1974. In the USA the diesel engine was only popular for a short while (1978-1981). In Japan too, it continued to be unpopular because of its carcinogenic exhaust gases. The summer smog at the beginning of the 1990s led to tighter EU exhaust emission standards. Natural gas was considered as a possible alternative. European manufacturers also experimented with e-cars. In spite of that, Europe did finally invest in the new diesel technology with high-pressure injection units, and in 2001 the soot particle filter introduced by Peugeot made the diesel engine 'green' – at least in the opinion of Germany's minister of the environment Trittin – , though the USA and Japan saw things differently. Then, the discovery of manipulation of exhaust measurement values in 2015 made the diesel the 'work of the devil' both in the USA and in Europe.