BMW and Daimler Move Against Executives Over Diesel Tests on Monkeys<br />FRANKFURT — The German carmakers BMW and Daimler said on Wednesday<br />that they had taken action against executives involved in an organization that sponsored emissions experiments on monkeys, as the companies tried to squelch a public outcry that threatens to tarnish the image of Germany’s most important exports.<br />Researchers there exposed one group of the monkeys to exhaust from a late-model diesel Volkswagen;<br />a second group was exposed to exhaust from an older Ford diesel pickup truck.<br />The company did not disclose his name, but a report by the organization summarizing its activities from 2013 to 2015, said the carmaker<br />was represented by Udo Hartmann, whose title was head of Daimler’s group environmental protection and energy management<br />Over the last 20 years, diesel cars have taken a strong hold on the European market, thanks in large part to regulations<br />that made them cheaper to fill up than gasoline-powered cars.<br />In this instance, the monkeys were being used to try to help the companies sell diesel cars by showing<br />that emissions were less harmful than many scientists had maintained.<br />Public outrage has been further inflamed — and has spread to BMW<br />and Daimler — by the carmakers’ use of monkeys as test subjects in what was effectively a marketing campaign.<br />The falloff began after Volkswagen was caught in 2015 using software to conceal excess emissions by its diesel cars.<br />BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen financed the organization and all three companies had representatives on its board.
