FRANKFURT - German carmakers are keeping their fingers crossed that a high-profile domestic debate about diesel motors' impact on air quality does not scare away buyers at a time when sales are already weak.
Brisk demand for fuel-sipping diesels has been a bright spot for the hard-hit sector, but health-conscious Germans have been swept up by concerns that diesels may make people -- especially children -- ill if the cars have no filters that trap soot.
"We have to take this topic seriously," Volkswagen marketing chief Georg Flandorfer told industry paper Automobilwoche in an interview published on Monday.
"Dealers have told me there is a lot of customer interest to have particle filters retrofitted. We should concentrate on retrofit solutions for now because that does the most for the environment," he added.
VW will come up with such products by autumn while expanding its range of optional filters for new diesel cars, he said.
Other German manufacturers are also rushing to offer particulate filters as standard or optional equipment.
DaimlerChrysler's Mercedes-Benz brand, for instance, boasts that it now offers 20 diesel models with maintenance-free filters, more than any other carmaker.
The filters are standard in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands for newly ordered C-, E-, CLK- and M-class vehicles.
Automobilwoche cited German garages association ZDK as estimating that dealers were sitting on inventory of more than 100,000 diesel cars that did not have the filters and had thus lost up to 1,000 euros in value over the past two weeks.
A spokesman for the German car industry association VDA noted sales of diesel cars went up in March and in the first quarter versus the year-ago periods, but added the debate really heated up only late last month so April would be a key month.
"We have to watch out that there is not an impact because everyone talks about it so long that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Eckehart Rotter said.
Diesel-powered cars accounted for 44.5 percent of new car registration in the first quarter, up 3.5 points from the year-ago period, the KBA motor vehicles agency said last week, although it could not yet judge the filter debate's impact.
Overall car sales fell 1.9 percent in the quarter.
The German government plans legislation to speed the introduction of diesel engine particle filters after two German cities breached new European Union air pollution limits only weeks after they came into force at the start of the year.
The news that Munich and Stuttgart had both gone over the EU limits, with several other German cities on the brink of following, has sparked widespread discussion over airborne particle pollution and its ill effects on people's health.
Most of the particles occur naturally, but they also come from industrial emissions and from tyres as they wear down.
The debate seems to be most pronounced in Germany.
"The discussion about particle filters for diesel cars is typically German and is not an issue in France," French carmaker Renault's chief executive, Louis Schweitzer, told German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
France's PSA Peugeot Citroen has blazed the way in the sector, making more than 1 million filter-fitted diesel cars since 2000, but filter shortages have hit its output this year.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
