What a week it’s been. You’ve admitted to the world that you have sold 11 million vehicles that are much more polluting than what you advertised them to be. You’ve admitted that you’ve installed software in your cars that specifically detects when a car’s emissions are being measured (i.e. the engine is running but the car is not moving) in order to fake the measurements. You’ve set aside 6.5 billion Euros to deal with this scandal, and have replaced your CEO.
This episode will go down in corporate history as a textbook example of large-scale industrial fraud for a number of reasons. First, there is the fact that the mechanism of deception was software-based. Second, you haven’t just duped millions of people into buying a product they would never have bought had they known the truth – in the process, you’ve contributed to massive pollution that’s affecting everyone’s health, not just that of your customers. Third, the betrayal of trust is at an unparalleled scale – you’ve sold polluting machines specifically to a group that’s sensitive to environmental issues. Many who bought a VW diesel bought it precisely because they assumed it to be less polluting than the competing products. Fourth, we’re not just talking about selling candy – we’re talking about products that cost tens of thousands of dollars. In other words, we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars of products sold under completely false advertising.