Unethical Measures by Volkswagen: A Case Study

Running head: BUSINESS ETHICS
BUSINESS ETHICS
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1BUSINESS ETHICS
Introduction:
The aim of this paper is to discuss the unethical measures taken by one of the reputed
international car brand namely Volkswagen relating to the fraud of developing faulty engine.
The company has successfully managed to cheat the EPA or Environmental protection
agency through the device that can fraud the carbon emission at the time of test. This
unethical initiative taken by the company not only affect the brand name and reputation but
also the live and interest of the stakeholders. The customers who have already focused the
defected cars cannot use them anymore, the shareholders are have faced huge financial loss,
the dealer of the Volkswagen cars also face problems in the market and most importantly the
employees who have been unknowingly engaged themselves in the production of such
defected engines have lost their jobs. This particular incident now can be analyzed through
two most important ethical theories like deontology and utilitarianism. Both their theories are
assisted with the ethical decision making procedure and how the individual or the
organization can make ethical decision in their business. This paper will be discussing the
background of the incident, analyses two different theories relating to ethics and provided a
refection bearing recommendation that what the company can do in this particular situation.
Background:
The unethical issue is related with one of the most reputed car manufacturing
companies Volkswagen that has subsidiaries in different markets of the world. For the last
four years the company has been dealing with the aftermath of its internal scandal that dented
the company in far reaching way. Volkswagen has always been a reputed company that
promotes itself to be the people’s car and attracting them through its low gas emitting
capabilities. It was only in 2015, when the company faced the consequences of unethical
business decisions. As mentioned before, the company had been accused for fraud the in the

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emission test in the USA (Jung & Park, 2017). This went against the Environmental
Protection Agency or EPA had discovered that the company has used a software that can
detect EPA’s parameter (Li et al., 2018). This particular software was attached in the
Volkswagen cars which allowed them to change their performance for matching the emission
levels in the federal.
This issue was only revealed when a small research team from the University of West
Virginia aimed to test the carbon emission in the three international cars namely, BMW,
Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen but found out an unbelievable method of chatting carbon
emission (Markowitz et al., 2017). The company had been equipped with the vide variety of
diesel vehicles with defeat device. For complying with the emission standard by the US
authority, each and every diesel car manufacturers are expected to install a software that will
clean the diesel exhaust. In the case of Volkswagen, this particular software, it was using,
enables when the car underwent the emission testing but used to shut off in the case of
normal driving conditions for improving the fuel economy as well as performance
(Markowitz et al., 2017). This has affected the diesel cars of Volkswagen to emit 40 times the
accepted and legal amount of nitrogen dioxide into air that affect the environment more than
expected.
According to Jung and Park, (2017) the further testing and discovered that the
fourteen particular cars make models were equipped with this particular duping software that
mad the company to recall more than 11 million of its vehicles for defective engine software.
More than 10 million vehicle from Europe and 580000 cars from the US were to undergo this
process. Since the scandal went public, the company has been talking appropriate steps as
well as actions for correcting mistakes at their best whole coping with the problems doe to
save its image.