VOLKSWAGEN AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHEATING AND DEFRAUDING

I've driven two VWs in my lifetime.  Both were my father's.  The first was a dark green bug in the late 1960s, and the second was the square back he got to replace the bug in the early '70s.  He loved them both and I did too.  They got good mileage, which somehow mattered even when gas was thirty cents a gallon. They were inexpensive--about half what most entry level cars cost, at least my entry with a 1970 Camaro.  They were nicely engineered, it seemed to me, admittedly a budding humanist with no car skills, but also to my father, an airplane mechanic.  If I'd known how to articulate it then, I would have characterized the VW as precision quality for the working class.  The Camaro didn't not so much. In 1973 three college friends and I took the square back to Kalispell, Montana, for a Christmas break adventure drive across I80.  We never made it.  In the middle of the night, when the rest of us were asleep, the driver dozed and rolled the car beside the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, knocking around us four boys and scattering and destroying our skis which clattered from the roof rack like so many pick up sticks.  No one was hurt.  Except my father who drove out to reclaim us.  The car was a total loss. My memory of Dad was that he never cried, but I won't forget his shoulders heaving as he bowed his head on his arms along the gutter above the driver's side doors. He never drove a Volkswagen again.

My next experience with the company was when another good college friend got an Audi.  I was clueless enough to miss that it wasn't a working class car, but I knew it was a good one.  In graduate school I drove my Professor's diesel from upstate New York to an exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art.  My memory of that, beyond the good mileage and comfortable ride for five grad students, was in the middle of the night after the gas station attendant had filled it up when one of us realized that he'd filled it with gasoline instead of diesel.  The attendant had to suck on a rubber tube to siphon the tank and replace it at the station's cost.  The diesel ran cheaply and clean.  That was when diesel was cheaper than gasoline and got great mileage. Volkswagens were distinctive, economical, trustworthy--qualities that showed up in their marketing for the revived "Bug" as pitched, as one commentator pointed out, to aging hippies with its streamlined retro design and cheery, Peter Max-styled graphics.

NowVW is known as the company that "cheated."  VW--whomever that is--built software into the car's operating system that deliberately falsified data detailing the diesel car's emissions and mileage.  Something that the NPR reporter said bothered me.  She repeatedly stated that the company "cheated."  Like VW had taken a test and got the answers out of the regulator's desk.  Or incorporated somebody's software, or spark plug as their own. As an educator, I'm familiar with the concept. Passing off someone else's work as one's own. As a lifelong, but casual Patriot's fan, I'm acutely aware of inflation and deflation in more than trivial, economic terms. But it didn't feel quite right in the face of revelations about VW's deceptions.  I couldn't reconcile VW's corporate responsibility with cheating.  The CEO said he was "endlessly sorry."  I'll bet. He promised to work to regain consumer trust.  Good luck with that.  When did he become sorry?  Is the company sorry?  What does that even mean? It's a symptom of the corporatization of the Western World that the spokesperson almost certainly has--and will take--no personal responsibility.  And without personal responsibility, any responsibility will effervesce and evaporate like so many gas bubbles.

Cheating is when you pass off a car, most of the parts of which are made in East Asia as "American." Cheating is when governments secretly subsidize the production of cars produced in their country to give an unfair market advantage.  What VW--people at VW--engineers and supervisors and their supervisors--did was promise one thing and deliver another.  Their engineers  (and at the very lest the software and the internal combustion engineers and their keepers, and their keepers, colluded at promising one level of performance while deliberately delivering another.  It just added injury to insult that the level of performance that VW promised was so peculiarly identified with its brand.  VWs promises were hardly verifiable. Before World War II a good mechanic could figure out what was wrong with a misbehaving car and how to fix it.  Things became more complicated in the 60s and 70s as parts became less and less interchangeable--the hallmark of American industry.  More and more specialized knowledge, and particular manufactures, are essential for parts and service.  For the last fifteen years, a humanist could barely hope to change the oil let alone understand the operational workings of new cars.  In short, we have to take the word of the corporation--which has it's own concerns and demands keeping up with the running of the country.  It's claims aren't verifiable.  And most people could care less.  And here I'm talking not just about VW.  Volkswagen is hardly alone, and I don't think for a minute   that other automobile manufacturers aren't delivering what they say they are. We don't know what's in our hotdogs let alone our dietary supplements or TV dinners. And we couldn't hope to understand thew workings of our cars without a degree in engineering.  Or an MBA. This fraud was not perpetrated by mid level engineers who wrote some code to save their bosses some bucks.

My Grandparents and their car in the 1930s - He could fix it (but he was an engineer).

What Volkswagen did was pretend to do one thing--produce the image of a car that appealed to our feel good concern with our environment in the vaguest possible terms--and deliver another--a car that had the power and comfort the Western public has come to demand.  By a software sleight of hand, Volkswagen delivered to the Western world a vehicle that made them feel good about their corrupting addiction to fossil fueled transportation (and I certainly am aware that I keep that company).  They defrauded the consumer by making it pay for one clean thing and delivering another, just as dirty as ever.