What's the news?
Opel has re-confirmed its decision, announced at the tail end of 2015, to publish Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) fuel consumption figures from June this year onwards, alongside existing NEDC and CO2 information.
WLTP aims to better inform customers of real-world potential fuel economy returns by offering a range of values from low to high, although further data laws - known as Real Driving Emissions (RDE) - are due to come into effect in September 2017. Opel will reveal the WLTP numbers on the Astra from June, with further models following soon after.
In addition, the German company is going to bring in new, unspecified technologies in its Euro 6 Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) diesel engines from August 2016, which aim to reduce NOx emissions even further ahead of RDE in 2017. And Opel says it will carry out this modification on 57,000 existing Euro 6 SCR vehicles already on European roads, as part of a 'voluntary customer satisfaction field action'. This will affect Zafira Tourer, Insignia and Cascada models.
Anything else?
"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's 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."