[Roberto71]

Damn....looks serious. BMW HQ and an engine factory in Austria were raided by 100 officials.

FRANKFURT — Prosecutors in Munich searched BMW’s headquarters on Tuesday as part of their continuing investigation into an emissions-cheating scandal that has badly damaged other German carmakers.

BMW, which is known for its sporty luxury cars, had until recently been relatively unscathed by the matter, which has cost Volkswagen billions of dollars, prompted investigations of the luxury carmaker Daimler and depressed sales of profitable diesel models across Europe.

The raids on Tuesday, in which about 100 investigators targeted BMW offices in Munich and an engine factory in Austria, suggested that all of Germany’s top domestic automakers may have evaded emissions rules, although perhaps not to the same degree as Volkswagen.

If so, the risk to Germany’s car industry, and to the nation’s broader economy, would increase sharply. Motor vehicles are the country’s largest export product, and BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz division, and Volkswagen’s Audi and Porsche units dominate the global market for luxury cars, where brand image is a crucial ingredient.

Munich prosecutors said in a statement that they were investigating whether the software in some BMW diesel models functioned like so-called defeat devices, cranking up pollution controls when a car’s engine computer detects an emissions test in progress and allowing excess exhaust under real-world conditions.

What's worrying is that BMW installed some dodgy software. Still, it seems a very small amount of cars affected.

BMW said on Tuesday that the software that prompted the raids had been installed by mistake, and that the company had not intentionally tried to deceive regulators. None of the vehicle models at issue are in the United States, BMW said.

“In the course of internal testing, the BMW Group realized that a correctly developed software module had been allocated in error to models for which it was not suited,” the company said in a statement.

BMW said it would recall about 11,400 cars containing the software to fix the problem, a minuscule number considering that Volkswagen has admitted to installing emissions-cheating software in 11 million vehicles around the world.

[teaston]

http://f30.bimmerpost.com/forums/sho....php?t=1477999

Only by 2 minutes though!

[Kal101]

Presume they’re just check8nh every one.

Only checking nothing concrete - yet