Opel premises raided by German "dieselgate" investigators

German police raided premises of the Ruesselsheim-based carmaker Opel in the course of ongoing "dieselgate" investigations on Monday.

A spokesperson for the Hesse state criminal police office confirmed that "police measures" were underway at Opel as of Monday morning without providing further details about the operation.

The subsidiary of the French PSA Group was first named as potentially being implicated in fraudulent diesel emissions cheating practices during a transport ministry hearing back in July but, unlike domestic rivals Volkswagen and Daimler, has otherwise previously evaded formal judicial scrutiny in the affair.

In a statement in reaction to the searches, Opel said that probes had been conducted at its corporate locations in Russelsheim and Kaiserslautern "in the framework of an investigatory procedure concerned with the subject of emissions." Nevertheless, the automotive company insisted that all its vehicles complied with relevant regulations.

According to the German newspaper BILD, around 95,000 vehicles in total of the Opel Insignia, Zafira and Cascada models built during the years 2012, 2014 and 2017 are affected by the latest development in the German "dieselgate" scandal.

In the ministry of transport hearing in July, Opel was asked to provide information about the function of exhaust system defeat devices in three of its models. A spokesperson for the ministry said at the time that it was too early to reach conclusions about the "legitimacy" of the technology in question.

The federal government in Germany has recently unveiled a "dieselgate" policy package aimed at preventing looming driving bans with alternative measures including fleet renewal incentives and so-called "hardware upgrades" of affected vehicles to reduce their NOx emissions levels.

Opel is among the majority of carmakers who continue to resist calls for technical retrofitting measures on the grounds that they are economically and technologically unfeasible.