A Brief History
On June 13, 2018, Volkswagen was fined a whopping billion Euros by the EU in conjunction with an emissions tricking scheme hatched by VW to beat clean air requirements in Europe and the US.
Digging Deeper
The VW scandal, using special computer programs to falsify emissions testing of their turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines, is not unique among car companies’ efforts to bamboozle governments and consumers. Further investigation showed that other car companies had also cheated on diesel engine emissions, including Jeep, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Renault, and Fiat.
Another extreme scandal, this time of a deadly nature, concerned Ford allegedly knowing about the risk of fire when their Pinto mini-car was rear ended and not adequately mitigating the danger.
Car makers have also been accused of lying about safety tests and gas mileage performance, among other ways of fooling authorities and consumers.
Question for students (and subscribers): What other industries lie about their products? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Cullen, Francis, et al. Corporate Crime Under Attack, Second Edition: The Fight to Criminalize Business Violence. Anderson, 2006.
Ewing, Jack. Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. Audible Studios, 2017.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz of a 2010 Volkswagen Golf TDI displaying “Clean Diesel” at the Detroit Auto Show, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.