German Court Dismisses Climate Cases Against BMW and Mercedes-Benz
Court rejects claims against carmakers
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled on March 23, 2026, that private individuals cannot force car manufacturers to stop placing passenger cars with combustion engines on the market before the deadlines set by the EU Passenger Car Emissions Regulation.
The cases targeted German car manufacturers including Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Plaintiffs had sought to stop the sale of new combustion-engine cars from November 2030, arguing that the companies’ emissions-related business activities consumed too much of the remaining global CO₂ budget.
Plaintiffs’ argument and the ruling
Relying on the German Federal Constitutional Court’s climate decision, the plaintiffs argued that only a limited CO₂ budget may be used if the climate targets of the Paris Climate Agreement are to be met. They said the defendants were unlawfully interfering with the intertemporal dimension of their general right of personality by using too much of that remaining budget.
According to the plaintiffs, this depletion would make far-reaching CO₂ reduction measures necessary at a later stage, leading to future restrictions on their civil liberties.
The Federal Court of Justice rejected that reasoning. It held that the plaintiffs were not impaired in their general right of personality by the defendants’ economic activities. The court also said such an impairment could not be established in advance on the theory that emissions attributable to the defendants would inevitably lead to restrictive climate legislation and related future limits on freedom.
Why the court drew a distinction
The court said that such a legally mediated inevitability would require the definition of a specific residual CO₂ budget for the defendants. It found that neither the Paris Climate Agreement nor existing legislation provided a basis for assigning such budgets to the carmakers.
For that reason, the court concluded that the claims differed from the constellation addressed in the earlier constitutional climate ruling.
Broader climate litigation context
The decision comes amid a broader wave of climate litigation in Germany. A separate case brought by a German farmer against another German car manufacturer remains pending before the Higher Regional Court in Hamm.
That court recently held in another climate-related matter that a German energy company could, at least in principle, be liable for costs to protect a Peruvian farmer’s property threatened by the possible overflow of a glacial lake in the Andes.