72,000 claimants will soon be receiving an update from their lawyers Milberg London LLP in respect of their legal claim against Mercedes-Benz.
The action alleges that the car manufacturing giant installed so-called ‘defeat devices’ within their vehicles at the manufacturing stage with the specific intention of cheating emissions tests.
In a similar UK case, in May 2022 Volkswagen AG settled with 91,000 car owners to the tune of £193m. In 2020 Mercedes-Benz paid 250,000 American consumers an average of $3,290 each and were penalised a further $1.4bn by the US government i) for breaching the Clean Air Act and ii) to fix the polluting vehicles that had been purchased.
However in the UK, Mercedes-Benz has so far defended the claims and has chosen not to compensate its customers that it is said to have deceived, despite the same wrong-doing having been resolved by Mercedes-Benz in the US years ago. It’s difficult to reconcile Mercedes-Benz’s different approach to US and UK consumers when the underlying allegations are the same worldwide. One explanation may be the differing legal systems and the car manufacturer taking advantage of opportunities to play the long game and hoping UK consumers lose interest.
The total number of claimants in the group action, including Milberg’s clients, is 300,000. It is the biggest case of its kind even though it still only represents a small proportion of the total number of consumers affected by the scandal. Assuming the US settlement values, the total Mercedes-Benz related claim value in England and Wales would be close to $1 billion. However, given enhanced consumer rights in this country and consumers having been forced to wait so long to receive due compensation claimants are, quite rightly, pushing for much more.
Now, in what is seen as a significant milestone, the English High Court has ordered that claimants submit their Schedule of Claimant Information forms (SOCI) via their law firm, including Milberg London. All 300,000 Mercedes-Benz claimants in the group action are in the process of receiving requests from their respective law firms to complete the necessary information that the court has ordered be collated in order to progress the case to the next stage.
