MOTORING NEWS - Volkswagen South Africa has been reassuring local owners that the international "Dieselgate" catastrophe doesn't affect their products locally.
This comes as a relief in view of the continuing developments in the international scandal that engulfed the German automotive giant.
For owners this is obviously a great relief in terms of their immediate concerns.
A larger and more abstract issue now remains for all Volkswagen owners: they love the brand, but can they still trust it as before? This is the less direct side-effect of the unethical behaviour of the company. It will need to be addressed worldwide - and locally - going forward. Volkswagen gave us the Love Bug and alot closer to home: the Kombi advertising featuring David Kramer in his red vellies.
Volkswagen owners also rarely stray from the brand and it is always somewhere on everyone's test drive wish list when replacing a car.
So Volkswagen's behaviour in the recent scandal should not be ignored by South Africans because it doesn't affect us or because regulators are not universally loved.
Unfortunately both these views have been expressed by well-known motoring journalists. But these arguments are merely defensive and miss the point that Volkswagen's brand was based on the perception of it total truthfulness towards millions of customers as "the people's car".
The company's cold-blooded deception was not a single lapse or a small one. It ducked and defied for almost a year. The faulty figures provided are not "out" by a small margin - the emissions are 40 times higher than legally allowed in the United States. Bearing in mind that diesel has been fighting and slowly winning perceptions about being a carcinogenic form of pollution makes it more serious.
Having CEO Martin Winterkorn resign and investigating two engineers for the fiasco will not resolve the ethical questions that now start popping up.
Talking about ethical business and the need for corporate governance can make business people bristle. "The business of business is business," they argue.
This may have worked up to the last century, but stakeholders, including investors, activists and the media, now also demand sustainability. As early as 1961 Texas Instruments (IBM) supplied an ethics quick test to employees with seven questions:
• Does it comply with our values?
• If you do it, will you feel bad?
• How will it look in the newspaper?
• If you know it is wrong, don't do it
• If you're not sure, ask
• Keep asking until you get an answer
In the last decade corporate scandals have meant a far greater need for ethics and corporate governance. Rules for multinational companies and listed companies are now stricter than ever. Whether this is fair in a competitive business environment can be argued, but three reasons leap out: wide acceptance that pure capitalism is not sustainable any more and that companies are seen as legal and moral entities.
The second reason is the effect a company like Volkswagen can have if its income (US$ 219-billion in 2014) is larger than that of a developing country such as Algeria (US$ 214-billion). (Figures from Volkswagen annual report and World Bank respectively).
And the third reason is trust - such as we had in the Love Bug and Volkswagen Kombi Bus.
Volkswagen published extensive sustainability reports. Those of the last three years can be read on their website (www.volkswagen.com). So the framework and rules were set for transparency, fairness and accountability - or the triple bottom line that is now part of company law in SA. This principle is based on people, planet and profit. In its deception over the emissions tests, other supplied information could now be considered suspect. Trust is indivisible after all - there is really no trusting "mostly" or "only a bit"...
"They only confessed once they had run out of all other excuses," the regulator summed up the battle of almost a year to get Volkswagen to admit the facts.
Worst of all, the deception was aimed exactly those motorists who wanted to do their share towards a greener world - and paying more for the privilege. Eleven million of them worldwide.
Article by Anica Krüger, who holds a Master's degree in ethics and was the third ethics officer certified by the Ethics Insitute of South Africa, of which she is a founding member. She has been a motoring editor for six years and is a full member of the SA Guild of Motoring Journalists.
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