German police raided BMW’s headquarters in Munich on Tuesday as part of an investigation into suspected cheating on diesel emissions. BMW said in a statement that it was cooperating with authorities. “The BMW Group takes the situation very seriously and has a significant interest in the circumstances being fully explained,” the automaker said.
Prosecutors said that 100 police officers were involved in the raids, which also targeted a second BMW location in Austria. Legal sources said the facility searched in Austria was BMW’s engine plant in Steyr, where the company employs about 4,500 staff and assembles 6,000 engines a day.
BMW, in a separate statement, said prosecutors were looking into “erroneously allocated” software in about 11,400 vehicles of the BMW 750d and BMW M550d luxury models.
Having long denied its cars are equipped with software designed to game emissions tests, BMW said the findings did not reveal a “targeted manipulation” of emissions cleaning.
BMW last month recalled 11,700 cars to fix engine management software after discovering the wrong programming had been installed.
[Source: Reuters]
