5 Questions About VW’s Lies

So Volkswagen lied, systematically, about emissions. Crane and Matten have some questions about how it happened, how wide-spread the problem is, and just who knew about the scheme as it was hatched and implemented. >>>

LINK: The Volkswagen diesel deception – 5 key questions (from the Crane and Matten Blog)

News about Volkswagen’s (VW) emerging emissions test rigging scandal makes one wonder if there is ever a story in business ethics too preposterous to be true. But it certainly raises some interesting and important questions about the nature of corporate responsibility that demand some pretty quick answers.

In some ways, it is not a complicated story, and even the CEO Martin Winterkorn today admitted to the firms culpability and apologized. “We totally screwed up” he was reported as saying. So, VW deliberately manipulated the software that manages their diesel engines so that the emission data in test mode appeared significantly lower (up to 40%) than in reality…..

What do you think?

See also this entry on Scandals, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Business Ethics.

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