Germany

The manipulation of exhaust emission standards through electronic devices in about 11 million Volkswagen cars worldwide, labeled Dieselgate, has given rise to one of the greatest industrial scandals in Germany in the last decades. Made public by a notice of violation of the US environmental protection agency in November 2015, its economic and legal consequences are still not foreseeable. The present contribution focuses on a crucial dimension of the scandal: the legal situation of buyers, mostly consumers, of manipulated cars under private and—as proof of criminal offenses may largely facilitate liability claims against Volkswagen—criminal law. Its main sources are German legal literature and the first national court decisions on the matter, which deserve to be presented to a foreign audience. Concluding that, contrary to the situation in criminal law, the available remedies under private law are not sufficiently effective, the contribution joins recent calls for the establishment, on the model of capital market law, of a collective action in consumer law to enhance the legal position of consumers.