Funders, PACCAR and the Regulatory Reset

The High Court rejected the vast majority of the allegations that the vehicles contained prohibited defeat devices. Where the court found a calibration strategy served a legitimate engineering purpose — protecting components, managing temperature — it was not a defeat device, and claims built on it fail at the first hurdle

Open any business book or conference keynote and the odds are high you'll meet Sun Tzu within the first few pages. He is quoted more than he is read, and read more than he is understood — conveniently vague, flattering to the quoter, and written for a world that is not yours. This opens Better Sources: a short series on the strategists who actually earn their keep, starting with Clausewitz, who owns the single most useful idea in all of strategic writing. Cargo-cult strategy

Pan-NOx was not decided by claimant numbers. It was decided by case theory, evidence, and the capacity to sustain both over years. The defendants concentrated the fight on the statutory definition and let the construction argument carry the volume of allegations away; Mercedes converted a systemic vulnerability into a discrete, time-bound point by fixing it a decade before trial. For anyone who funds, prices or manages group litigation: strategy and resources still beat scale

Mercedes-Benz closed 2025 on €32.2 billion of net industrial liquidity and borrows at investment-grade rates. The claimant ecosystem that just lost to it pays 10% to 30%-plus for capital — sometimes far more. That asymmetry doesn't decide legal questions; it decides how long each side can afford to fight. From Pan-NOx to the FCA's £7.5 billion motor finance redress scheme, via the collapse of a £250 million funder, this is the arithmetic behind the war of attrition.

On 10 July 2026 the High Court handed down judgment following the liability issues trial in the Pan-NOx Emissions Group Litigation — the largest group action in English legal history. Around 1.6 million claimants, proceeding under Group Litigation Orders, alleged that diesel vehicles made by the lead defendant manufacturers — Mercedes-Benz among them, alongside Ford, Renault-Nissan and Peugeot-Citroën — contained prohibited defeat devices: software that kept NOx emissions low