Dieselgate. An Ethical Analysis

Essay from the year 2022 in the subject Business economics - Business Ethics, Corporate Ethics, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: Since 2015 Volkswagen Group has been officially involved in an emission fraud scandal (Dieselgate) and its repairments, which led to be one of the most costly fraud cases in the history of the automotive industry. The self-imposed Dieselgate was an expression of poor work by VW with inadequate decisionmaking by management, unethical corporate governance, and a lack of a duty of responsibility.

VW faced three allegations of misconduct. Intended air pollution, breaking the rules and cheating on emissions tests. Therefore, the Dieselgate is used to analyze and explain the assertion "Not doing something can require investments" by referring to the ethical compass (EC). The study is going stepwise to explain the meaning of the assertion by giving a rough understanding of the Dieselgate (Chapter 2), analyzing the Dieselgate with the help of the EC to answer the question whether VW postponed its investments into the future or not (Chapter 3), transferring the analysis results to the general to define the real meaning of the assertion (Chapter 4) and then giving a conclusion (Chapter 5).