Right now, Volkswagen is stumbling beneath the weight of a scandal that is causing every Prius and Tesla driver to question how many sustainability brownie points they really deserve as consumers of corporations pegged as sustainable.
For six years, environmentally concerned drivers have been buying Volkswagens because they are willing to pay more for sustainable vehicles. Now, after years of making claims that their diesel cars are at the cutting edge of low emission technologies, it has been discovered that the company has been using special software that artificially lowers the carbon emissions detected during testing.
Since 2009, 11 million eco-friendly consumers worldwide have been driving cars that spew 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide emissions. In the U.S. alone, the federal government has paid up to $51 million in tax subsidies to support the sustainable technology that Volkswagen has been boasting of its diesel cars.
This scandal also raises concerns for Germany’s economy, which rests to a large degree on the auto industry. Volkswagen distributors worldwide employ tens of thousands of people and in Germany alone there are 274,000 employees at their 29 factories. With a request from the Obama administration to recall almost half a million falsely tested vehicles, a lot of jobs are at stake.
Currently, many millennials are determined to channel all of their resources into consumer exchanges that minimize their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. This issue may become a catalyst for the formation of consumer activist groups that would lobby for transparency from companies that make ethical or altruistic claims.
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this scandal has been Volkswagen’s CEO Matin Winterkorn’s denial that he knew about the software that was used to cheat on emissions tests, even after resigning from his position at the company. The implication is that as an individual who is representing an organization at large, he is not responsible for the crimes committed by the machine he is a cog within. In the U.S., corporations are considered to be people in the court system, and when a corporation breaks the law, as Volkswagen has, that corporation can be sued or penalized as a single entity.
In Germany, however, actual human beings need to be blamed and prosecuted. As the prosecution of Volkswagen unfolds, consumers may begin to investigate and lobby for transparency from the corporations that they support; by seeing those corporations for what they are—organizations of individual people making real decisions from the top down.
If there is proper investigation of corporations not as people, but as organizations comprised of many people, then we can follow the life cycle of products created within the corporation. This process begins with an ideological conception at the top, to the pragmatic and technological innovation in the middle, to production and distribution at the bottom. By investigating the process of decision making within a corporation, consumers can learn how successful corporations with authentically altruistic mission statements operate and then lobby for all corporations to follow that model.
As Volkswagen undergoes investigation, consumers may turn to other companies in hopes of supporting an environmental or ethical cause, or may dig deeper into how the products that they buy are conceived, tested, and produced.