Announced last December, the voluntary move is intended “to improve transparency and meet future emission protocols” and will see figures “reflecting more everyday driving conditions” published first for the Opel Astra from June this year onwards alongside the official fuel consumption and CO2 figures. Figures determined under the WLTP test cycle will be published for further models later this year.

In addition, from August onwards, Opel will implement an initiative to improve NOx emissions on SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) diesel applications in new vehicles in advance of the RDE (Real Driving Emissions) legislation that goes into effect in September 2017.

From June this year, the measure will also be applied to 57,000 Euro 6 SCR vehicles (Zafira Tourer, Insignia and Cascada) that are already on the road in Europe.

“We at Opel strongly believe that the industry has to regain trust by increasing the transparency with customers and authorities. Opel takes this step towards RDE to show it can be done,” said Opel Group CEO Dr Karl-Thomas Neumann. “We announced in December in which direction we are going; now we are delivering the details. I ask the European Union as well as the EU member states and other European countries to accelerate alignment on test set-ups and test interpretations on real-driving-measurements to stop the existing uncertainty caused by test results that are hardly comparable.”

Dr Neumann added: “I strongly believe that diesel technology will only continue to play a major role in Europe if the industry sticks to the path of continuous improvement. That is one of the reasons why we decided to implement SCR-Technology to the entire diesel fleet starting as of 2018. With this we do not only talk about a strategy of regaining trust, we also talk about a strategy to preserve the advantage of Europe’s automotive industry in diesel technology.”