Volkswagon Scandal in Canada

I feel that the largest factor in Volkswagen AG’s desire to deceive was the fact that over the last 10 years they have been striving to become the largest top Diesel Vehicle Supplier in the world. In 2008 a diesel Version of the Jetta was introduced as a Clean Diesel Vehicle and won rave reviews including “Green Car of the Year”.  This along with the company setting a goal to sell more than 10 million vehicles by 2018 and to become the leader in customer satisfaction and quality have put them in a position of having a lot of pressure on them to live up to the goals they set for the company. Volkswagen AG’s overwhelming desire to surpass the sales of Toyota and GM may have lead them to act in a very unethical manner and to conceal the problems that they were having with the NOx emission levels being  40% to high.

Another reason why the Company would have concealed this problem was that in order to fix this problem there would have had to have been a tradeoff.  In order to fix the NOx problem properly there would have been a reduction in the fuel efficiency and power of the actual vehicle which would have upset the consumers of Volkswagen diesel vehicles. There would have also been added costs to fix the problem and the company decided to come up with a solution on their own that they considered to be a cheap fix, until of course they were caught.

This scandal shows that there was a major breach of ethics for the company. It appears that all engineers that worked for Volkswagen AG were all well aware of this problem and were advised to cover this issue up. It appears that the directors of the company knew of the high NOx rates which contribute to ozone build up and respiratory illnesses and they admittedly rigged emission tests so that the vehicles operated within the allowable NOx levels, it has been said that Volkswagen AG created this cheaper software fix to save additional costs and to ensure that they were meeting the US emission standards. Due to the fact that so many of the Volkswagen AG staff and directors were aware of this situation that caused this scandal there has now been a 31% drop in the price of VW stock.