Friday reading for the rest of the week.

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

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

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