Volkswagen (VW) Emission Scandal

Introduction

The Volkswagen (VW) emission scandal is not an isolated case in recent history wherein a global company faced a gargantuan problem that is almost next to impossible to resolve. British Petroleum paid a whopping $20 billion settlement five years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (Griffin, et. al., 2015) Unfortunately, the Volkswagen scandal did irreparable damage to Germany's brand compared with British Petroleum or any other “trade scandal” because the case of VW was deliberate deception of consumers which might even possibly be an industry-wide deception. Diesel cars now have a bad reputation because of the high levels of emissions that they produce and they are 10-15% more expensive to insure

(Cowan, 2014) It recovered only in 2014 and brand value was US$34.9 billion which increased to US$35 billion this year. Toyota’s mechanical errors resulted to fatal accidents while Volkswagen’s deceptive activity may result to death but not immediately, so some people might mistakenly think that VW can recover from severe brand damage. Unfortunately, Toyota’s case was due to human error while that of VW was deliberate deception. VW’s brand identity rests on honesty, fuel economy reliability, efficiency of production, and environmental friendliness, but this image has been wiped off by the scandal. (Helm, et. al.,

Its previous claim of achieving success economically and ecologically was just a deceitful sales strategy as proven by the emissions scandal. (Hakim, et. al., 2015) Consumers bought VW cars because they thought those cars were environmentally friendly. Questionable also is the company culture in VW because the people who were responsible for the scandal were obviously pushed to make more sales through a corporate incentive system, which means that there was an incentive to manipulate the software, to have increased sales, revenue and profitability, and higher incentives for the corporate leaders. Consumers bought the cars which were advertised as environmentally friendly, and higher sales resulted to higher compensation and incentives to company executives. (Hakim, et. al., 2015) Therefore, it is highly doubtful and quite a flimsy excuse to day that the corporate leaders were not even aware that their engineers used a software that manipulated test results for mono-nitrogen oxides or NOx. VW leaders should just simply own up to their “grand ploy” to increase revenue, apologize to the public and all consumers in the world, return the money of all their buyers who were deceived by their false advertisement of having environment-friendly vehicles, and re-build the trust and brand image that got destroyed by the