Last month, Euroconsumers and Altroconsumo celebrated another significant milestone in the Dieselgate saga as €42.8 million in compensation was finally distributed to almost 47,000 Italian consumers.  

The distribution of damages follows a settlement reached in 2024 between Altroconsumo and Volkswagen which saw all eligible consumers able to get compensation ranging from €550 to €1,100 per vehicle, with an additional €300 in cases of joint ownership. 

This now stands as the most significant collective redress victory ever recorded in Italy. And consumers’ trust in Altroconsumo’s dedicated online compensation platform helped make sure this long overdue money got back into the pockets of consumers as easily as possible.  

The distribution concludes the collective legal proceedings brought by our Italian member in 2015 against the Volkswagen Group for installing software in millions of its vehicles that could cheat independent emissions tests. 

The ‘defeat device’ deception misled consumers on how polluting the cars were, prevented them from making informed choices, and caused affected vehicles to lose resale value.

Euroconsumers members’ uneven progress

But of course, this is not just an Italian story. Euroconsumers and its members have also brought collective actions against the Volkswagen Group across Belgium, Portugal and Spain, and other entities in different countries have launched similar actions to get compensation for the drivers of approximately 11 million cars worldwide which VW fitted with the ‘defeat device’ software.  

So far, even though the same company, same cars and same harmful practice impacted those millions of consumers in the same way, they have yet to see the same justice delivered at the same pace. Instead, progress has been painfully slow and patchy, as we can see from our Euroconsumer members: 

• • Belgium’s Testachats/Testaankoop obtained compensation in 2025 for owners of affected VW Group vehicles, including brands such as Skoda, Seat and Audi. Consumers were entitled to 5% of the purchase price of the car or 5% of the difference between the purchase price and the resale price if the buyer is no longer the owner. 
• • In a class action brought by our Spanish member OCU, the Spanish Commercial Court ruled in 2021 that the company must pay €3,000 in compensation to each affected consumer.  Volkswagen won its appeal against the ruling, resulting in the case being transferred from the Madrid trial court to the Barcelona Provincial Court, where proceedings had to restart from the beginning. The case remains pending, with the hearing potentially happening in 2027 – which will be six years after the first court compensation ruling, and eleven years since the case was first filed. 
• • In Portugal, progress in the case launched by DECO PROteste on behalf of 125,000 consumers came to a halt when a final ruling by the country’s Supreme Court of Justice acquitted the defendants. The case ended as a result of the court’s ruling on procedural issues, so in principle, a new action could eventually be brought. However, despite making every effort to secure redress for Portuguese consumers over eight years, the resources involved means DECO PROteste is not in a position to bring a new action.  

Dieselgate: location dictates consumer compensation success 

Despite the shared factual background to the case worldwide, results and timescales have varied significantly across other countries. It has been ten years since VW settled with US owners impacted by the defeat device, with up to $10,000 (€11,700) each available. In Australia, around A$120 million (€75 million) was made available to approximately 43,000 consumers, and in the UK, 90,000 drivers of particular models were part of a case which was settled for £193 million (€262 million) in 2022. 

But it is the discrepancy between consumer justice inside the EU single market that is more concerning. Through the various actions our members have brought against the VW Group in different jurisdictions, we’ve seen that receiving compensation too often depends on a car owner’s location. 

While this victory reflects over a decade of coordinated action by Euroconsumers and its member organisations to secure justice for consumers, it again reminds us of Europe’s problem with the private enforcement of consumer protection breaches that impact large numbers of people across the EU’s borders. 

Has the Representative Actions Directive delivered cross-border consumer justice? 

Consumer protection in a single market means little without effective, visible and consistent enforcement. Large companies that benefit from the single market must also be held accountable promptly and consistently across that same market when things go wrong. 

So to get compensation back to consumers quickly and keep competition fair, improvements are needed to the effectiveness of cross-border collective actions.

This objective was set out in the EU’s Representative Actions Directive (RAD), but how has it fared since it entered into application at national level in 2023? 

Representative Actions Directive: a work in progress  

The Directive is a landmark achievement and has been a huge step ahead for those Member States which previously lacked collective redress legislation, or were operating under frameworks that made initiating a class action impossible on a practical level. 

However, there has not yet been a truly unified “European class action”, instead, 27 different national regimes are being managed at once. This fragmentation is exacerbated by the huge discretion granted to Member States regarding whether to implement an opt-in or an opt-out system – which can include a greater number of consumers, with less barriers to entry.  

Even in instances where a national regime is opt-out, it remains an opt-in system for consumers from other countries who wish to benefit from the action, creating a dual-layered complexity for cross-border enforcement.  Euroconsumers’ Head of Litigation, Marco Scialdone flags some additional issues: 

For now, Euroconsumers and its organisations will work with the processes we have and continue to lead collective actions that deliver concrete benefits for consumers across Europe 

Through initiatives like the Re-act project, we are testing the power and practicality of collective redress in different areas of consumer law. The Re-act pilot project sees Altroconsumo working with partners in Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia to test out how the RAD can be leveraged to bring collective actions on behalf of consumers who have suffered when companies have failed to follow the rules of the Digital Services Act (DSA). 

This project will build the strength of consumer organisations to bring cases, and teach us more about what needs to be done to join up consumer redress in the EU.

It is not only the procedure but also the available redress measures that must be harmonized and standardized across the EU. This approach will prevent fragmentation of the enforcement landscape and avoid the unequal treatment of consumers based on their nationality or place of residence that has been seen so far in Dieselgate actions.