Continental AG is what you get when a tyre company spends a century marinating in war contracts, forced labour, cartel instincts, and emissions fraud, then wraps itself in ESG brochures and “mobility solutions” guff.

In the polite version of the auto industry, Conti is a “technology partner”. In the real version, it is one of those suppliers that always seems to be standing a bit too close to whatever scandal just exploded. Forced labour for the Nazis. Rigged emissions software for Volkswagen. Bid rigging. Mass job cuts. And now its electronics bolted onto Cummins engines, in the same dirty supply chain that just spat out a record-breaking $1.675 billion emissions penalty.

So no, this is not a neutral “strategic supplier”. This is a company with a past like a crime scene and a present that still reeks of the same instincts: cheat where you can, apologise when you must, sack workers when it gets tight, then pretend it is all just “transformation”.

Cummins Connection: Brains Of The Beast

First, the Cummins angle, because that is why this lands in Supplier Series at all.

Out in the wild you can find Continental-made engine control modules marketed specifically for Cummins platforms – ISF, QSF, ISB, QSB and the rest – full OEM part numbers, Conti on the label, Cummins in the product title. Service shops do not invent that combination for fun, and you do not tool up that hardware if you are not part of the ecosystem that keeps those engines alive.

In plain English: Continental’s electronics sit in the nervous system of engines running under Cummins’ name. Not every engine, not every product line. But enough that “Continental in the Cummins tent” is more than just a theoretical link.

Now park that next to Cummins’ own recent party trick: the defeat-device scandal on Ram diesel pickups. US and California regulators nailed Cummins for software that behaved when it sensed a test, then let NOx spew in real-world use. End result – a record $1.675 billion civil penalty under the Clean Air Act, plus recall and fix costs pushing the total cure up towards $2 billion once you add the California side deals and remedial work.

So you have Cummins, the diesel cheat TCAP has been hammering for months, and Continental, the supplier whose whole Dieselgate chapter is about emissions software being bent out of shape. It is not hard to see why they belong in the same series. Filth recognises filth.

Dieselgate: Continental’s Own Emissions Fraud Hangover

If the Cummins case is ugly, Continental’s Dieselgate chapter is downright rancid.

Volkswagen’s EA189 diesel engines – the ones that detonated the whole Dieselgate scandal – ran on control units and software that came from Continental, among others. Those engines did the now-famous trick: recognise lab test cycles, clean up for the clipboard, then dump NOx on the road like a rolling power station.

German prosecutors spent years crawling through Continental’s role. Police raids. Seized emails. In April 2024 prosecutors in Hanover whacked Continental with a €100 million fine for “negligent breach of supervisory duties” linked to those EA189 controls. The company accepted it, called it drawing a line under proceedings, and tried very hard to sound relieved rather than guilty as sin.

Then came the insurance money. In 2025, Continental reached a deal in which directors and officers insurers for ex-managers agreed to cough up tens of millions of euros to cover Dieselgate-related damage claims against former executives. Add fines, legal bills and internal costs and the overall hit runs into the hundreds of millions.

None of this is abstract. Excess NOx from those “clean” diesels is linked to respiratory disease and premature deaths. Whole cities choked while Conti’s gear helped keep the lie rolling. And the story is not done – in the UK, group lawsuits are still dragging Continental and the carmakers into court over alleged unlawful defeat devices.

This is what “negligent supervisory duties” really means when you strip the legalese away: you let your people help cheat the air.

Nazi-Era Pillar: Forced Labour And Death Marches For Rubber

And if you think this is just a modern management problem, you have not looked at their war record.

In 2020 an independent historical study, commissioned by Continental itself, finally laid out the full horror of the company’s role in the Nazi economy. The findings:

Around 10,000 forced labourers used at Continental and its subsidiaries, including concentration camp prisoners.
Rubber products and other kit supplied directly into the Nazi war machine.
Prisoners from Sachsenhausen forced to march staggering distances – up to 2,200 kilometres in total for some – to test shoe soles for the Wehrmacht until they collapsed.
A board that “welcomed the Nazi seizure of power with euphoria” and slotted itself neatly into the armaments apparatus.

Continental has apologised, funds education, and sticks that history in its “responsibility” materials. Fine. They are not unique among German industrials.

But the scale matters. This was not “we made a few tyres under duress”. It was enthusiastically feeding the regime, squeezing literally lethal mileage out of camp prisoners to improve product performance. When you see that kind of moral void in the foundations, it makes the modern willingness to fiddle emissions tests and slash jobs for margin feel less like drift and more like business as usual.

Hostile Embrace: Schaeffler’s 2008 Raid

Roll forward to the 2000s and the rot shows up in a different form.

Continental overreached with its Siemens VDO acquisition and staggered into the 2008 financial crisis loaded with debt. The Schaeffler Group – a family-owned bearings outfit – smelled blood and launched a hostile bid. They used derivatives and creeping purchases to gain effective control while technically pretending it was a friendly investment.

Conti management squealed about a “creeping takeover”. Politicians fumed. Unions saw the writing on the wall. Schaeffler eventually agreed to cap its stake below 50 per cent for a few years and play nice. But by then Continental was shackled to a heavily indebted new master and had burned through what remained of its independence.

Why does that matter now? Because it is another expression of the same story. Governance presented as grown-up and orderly; back-room manoeuvring that looks like a knife fight in a boiler room. The workers and minority shareholders are just scenery.

Veyance: Antitrust Tripwire In The US

Continental’s growth streak took another hit when it tried to swallow Veyance Technologies, a US rubber and industrial products maker, in a $1.8 billion deal.

US antitrust regulators looked at the overlap in commercial vehicle air springs and vibration control products and saw a problem – less competition, higher prices, fewer options for fleets. The Department of Justice forced Continental to divest Veyance’s North American air springs business as a condition for approval.

No fine this time, but another reminder that Continental’s instinctive move is “bigger, more dominant, fewer rivals” until someone in a government building tells them to put the fork down.

Brakes, Liability And The Nissan Case

On the safety front, Continental’s name shows up in a nasty bit of litigation with Nissan.

A driver in a 2004 Infiniti QX56 crashed, a jury found a brake defect contributed, and Nissan got hit with a sizeable verdict. It then tried to claw back more than $30 million from Continental Automotive Systems under indemnity language in their supply contract, arguing Conti’s components and design were to blame.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in a 2024 decision, shut most of that down. The wording of the contract did not give Nissan the blanket indemnity it fancied. Result – Nissan stuck with its own bill.

The detail is contractual, but the bigger point is simple. When something fails in the supply chain, the carnage lands on real people in real vehicles. Suppliers and OEMs then spend years arguing over who signs the cheque. For a company that sells itself as a safety leader, this is a grim little window into a world where liability is a hot potato and the human beings are just footnotes.

Tyre Cartel Whiff: Price Hikes And Class Actions

Tyres next. The boring bits of a car, until they are not.

In 2024 US plaintiffs lined up class actions accusing Continental and fellow giants like Goodyear, Bridgestone and Michelin of conspiring to hike prices on replacement tyres for passenger cars, vans, trucks and buses. The claim – coordinated increases that pushed prices up more than 20 per cent in a short window, well beyond inflation and input costs.

In early 2025 a federal judge threw one of the main US cases out for lack of hard evidence of a cartel. Other suits in different jurisdictions keep bubbling away. Continental and co deny everything, naturally.

Even without a smoking gun, the pattern is rancid. A tiny club of manufacturers, near-parallel price jumps, families and hauliers hammered at the checkout. If this is what “competition” looks like, you start to see why regulators and class-action firms smell blood.

Cutting Workers Loose: Restructuring As Bloodsport

Then there is the way Continental treats its own people, which is a scandal in slow motion.

The Clairoix tyre plant in France became infamous when it was shut down in 2009 – more than a thousand jobs gone, burning tyres in the car park, lives smashed. Local officials later linked the closure to spikes in divorces and suicides among former workers. The site became shorthand for what happens when global suppliers decide a town is no longer “competitive”.

Fast-forward to the EV transition and the same script is playing out across the group.

Thousands of jobs have already gone in multiple waves.
In 2025 alone, the company flagged another 3,000 R&D roles to be cut in its automotive division.
ContiTech, the industrial arm, is swinging the axe again – up to 1,500 posts on the block and several plants in Germany earmarked for closure or shrinkage.

Management calls it “future-proofing” and “portfolio adjustment”. Unions call it betrayal. The people on the line call it getting fucked over after decades of service.

Continental still finds the cash for dividends, investor days and “transformation” consultants. The pain is for the people at the bottom of the org chart.

Bid Rigging And Integrity As Slogan

Add to this the US criminal case where Continental Automotive Electronics and Continental Automotive Korea pleaded guilty to bid rigging on instrument panel clusters supplied to carmakers. That one earned them fines and another black mark on the ethics sheet.

Corporate reaction pattern:

Express “deep regret”.
Talk about strengthening compliance.
Launch an “integrity hotline” so employees can report the next scandal themselves.

Continental loves to talk about “Play fair. Win fair.” in its compliance material. In practice it has had to be dragged into courtrooms and enforcement settlements across antitrust, emissions, safety and history before it will even admit the basics.

Continental? In The Cummins Frame?

Put it all together and Continental AG is not just a boring tyre logo on a sidewall. It is:

A company that acted as a “pillar” of the Nazi war machine, using forced labour and death-march testing for its products.
A supplier whose electronics and software sat in the heart of Dieselgate and earned it a nine-figure fine for supervisory failure.
A serial job cutter that treats workers as ballast to be dumped whenever the numbers wobble.
A serial litigant and defendant around antitrust, safety and pricing cases.
And now, a quiet supplier of engine electronics into the Cummins ecosystem, the same Cummins that has just held its hands up to massive emissions cheating and a record environmental penalty.

Continental is not an unlucky bystander in a tough industry. It is exactly the sort of outfit you expect to find when you follow the pipes out of a scandal like Cummins’.

That is why it sits in the TCAP Supplier Series. If you are Cummins and you look at a history like this, then carry on doing business as usual, you are making a choice. You are saying this is the standard you accept in your chain.

Own it.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Supplier Series : Continental AG – Nazi Boots, Diesel Cheats, And Cummins’ Favourite Kind Of Filth