Daimler allegedly poses as DHL customer to gain StreetScooter access

Automobile manufacturer Daimler, a competitor of DHL for electric vehicle production, reportedly posed as a customer of DHL’s to get access to one of its StreetScooters.

According to Der Spiegel, Daimler engineers allegedly posed as workers from a fake nursing service and signed up for a rental programme which was launched by DHL last year.

The engineers gave a false address, which was noticed by DHL. The courier company then used GPS to track down the van and found it had been driven all the way to Stuttgart, Daimler’s hometown. It was then identified at a Daimler test track.

The StreetScooter was tracked down to Stuttgart.

DHL confronted Daimler, who returned the StreetScooter half an hour later. However, Daimler told Der Spiegel that as the StreetScooter had already been made publicly available to third parties, the company had done nothing wrong—despite the dubious cover story.

Last year, Daimler allegedly took apart a Tesla Model X it rented from a couple in Bavaria, via rental company Sixt. According to Der Spiegel, the vehicle was taken outside the region specified in the rental agreement to a location near Daimler headquarters and returned heavily damaged after seven weeks, during which time it had apparently been dismantled and stress-tested.

(Source: The Drive)