No major European car company has suffered more over the past few years than the Volkswagen Group. The triple gut punch of Chinese competition eroding demand, tariffs eating into profits, and a failed electric transition has put the German conglomerate in a financial pickle that it doesn’t expect to recover from until next year. How does it plan to recover? Aside from slashing even more jobs than previously planned, the group also wants to build luxury cars in the United States and “reduce complexity” within its collection of brands (i.e., more platform-sharing).
Things are looking particularly bad at Porsche, where operating profit for 2025 fell by 98% due to issues that mostly mirror the larger VW Group’s problems (tariffs, Chinese competition, overspending on EVs). Things aren’t expected to get better in 2026 for Porsche, either, with more job cuts on the way.
What else is going on today? Slate, the Amazon-backed affordable electric truck startup, announced a new CEO today, just months before it’s expected to start building its long-awaited pickup. Staying in the realm of boardroom shakups, Nissan is another company that hasn’t had a great go at things lately. Its new CEO, Ivan Espinosa, is trying his damndest to turn the company around. While the company is still losing money, it’s losing less money than it expected to. A new chief financial officer should help stabilize things further.
Don’t Worry, The CEO Still Got His Multi-Million-Dollar Bonus
Last month, VW executives came up with a plan to reduce the company’s costs by 20% following a bunch of spending for electric vehicle development, which hasn’t really panned out. Competition in China from domestic brands has eroded demand in the country, with pressure mounting from those brands in VW’s home region. On a media call Tuesday, group CFO Arno Antlitz revealed plans to cut a further 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030. This is on top of the 35,000 jobs already targeted for elimination within the conglomerate.
While Volkswagen closed a plant for the first time in its history back in December, Chinese brands are planting roots on the continent. It’s a whole new world, at least to CEO Oliver Blume. From Bloomberg:
“We are facing trade policy barriers, completely changed markets, different regulatory systems,” Chief Executive Officer Oliver Blume said on a media call. “The business model that has supported us for decades in the Volkswagen Group is not tenable anymore.”
VW is fighting back against fast-moving competition in China, still its most important market, and soft demand in Europe where the shift to EVs remains volatile. Chinese manufacturers are also preparing to enter Europe, with BYD Co., the world’s biggest EV maker, set to ramp up output in Hungary this year.
It’s not just job cuts where VW plans to save cash. It also wants to build Audis in the United States, where tariffs have kept the company’s market share at 4% (versus the company’s previous goal of 10% market share). And it could step on new subsidiary Scout Motors’ toes to do it.
To be “long term successful” Audi needs “some some localization there,” Antlitz said, pointing to VW’s existing factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, or a new factory that will make Scout Motors branded vehicles in South Carolina from next year as possible sites.
Antliz told Bloomberg that Volkswagen plans to lean even further into “reducing complexity in the group,” suggesting that platform-sharing might become even more common between the company’s brands, to drive down costs. VW is already the king of platform sharing; the Touareg above sits on the latest version of the MLB platform, which underpins five other SUVs in the group’s lineup. My hope is this means more VW-badged Porsches, rather than more Porsche-badged VWs. But if a report from back in September about the next Macan being basically a Q5 underneath is to be believed, I might not get my wish.
Nonetheless, CEO Oliver Blume isn’t going without a bonus despite VW’s performance in 2025. Because of net cash flows for the year, Blume is still receiving about $2.3 million on top of his normal compensation. If it makes you feel any better, that’s a lot less than last year, according to Manager Magazin:
Including pension contributions and variable compensation for several years, he received €7.4 million last year, according to the company’s annual report. The previous year, Blume had received around €3 million more from VW and Porsche combined.
One reason for the decline is the salary reduction implemented as part of the cost-cutting program. The Volkswagen board of directors is foregoing portions of its compensation totaling approximately 3.5 million euros in this context.
Once you get to a certain level, anything less than total company collapse means you usually get a bonus of some kind. Must be nice.
Once A Cash Cow, Now Barely Breaking Even
Much of the VW Group’s woes can be traced back to its luxury brands Audi and Porsche, which were previously two of the firm’s most profitable subsidiaries. Porsche, in particular, has had a rough time lately, with sales in China, formerly one of its largest markets, dropping by 26% last year. Things are so bad at the Stuttgart-based brand that its profit margin has essentially disappeared, falling well below analyst estimates. From Manager Magazin:
Porsche’s operating profit for 2025 amounted to €90 million, down from almost €5.3 billion the previous year – a decline of more than 98 percent. Including financial services, the sports car manufacturer achieved €413 million (2024: €5.6 billion). Analysts at Visible Alpha had expected an operating profit of almost half a billion euros, including financial services.
Back when Oliver Blume was in charge of Porsche, he planned to cut 4,000 jobs to save on costs. Then, in January, Michael Leiters, the former CEO of McLaren, was appointed to run the company. According to one report, he had to offer employees amnesty to find out just how bad things were. Manager Magazin expects even more cuts to emerge, which could happen as soon as tomorrow, when Leiters is expected to present financial results for 2025.
Just how many cuts are we talking? Manager Magazin published a feature on Porsche last month, where it pointed out that, in 2015, the company employed 25,000 people and built around 225,000 cars. Now, it employs 42,000 people, and the publication predicts it’ll produce the same number of cars in 2027 as it did in 2015. While I’m sure the cuts won’t be as drastic as the math suggests they might be, there are certainly ways to save money here that execs will take advantage of.
Slate Replaces Its Woman CEO On International Women’s Day
Despite a downturn in EV demand, Slate’s cheap pickup truck remains one of the most highly anticipated vehicle debuts of 2026. Christine Barman, the company’s CEO, was Slate’s first hire and has shepherded the project from small-time startup to full-on vehicle manufacturer over the past four years. Now, just months away from production, she’s being replaced by an Amazon exec. From TechCrunch:
Former Amazon Marketplace vice president Peter Faricy is the new person in charge of the company, and he started on Monday, Slate spokesperson Jeff Jablansky told TechCrunch. Most recently, Faricy had been an adviser at McKinsey and Bessemer Venture Partners. Faricy left the role at Bessemer to join Slate, according to Newsweek, which first reported the hire.
Considering Amazon has invested roughly $700 million into Slate, it’s not entirely surprising to see the company appoint one of its own to the role. But the timing is interesting. Barman has been the face of Slate since the firm revealed its truck back in April, so to remove her from the top spot now, at such a crucial time for the brand, is a bit odd.
Also, this is probably just a coincidence and bad timing, but Faricy starting on Monday means that Barman’s last day as CEO was on International Women’s Day, as the article’s author Sean O’Kane pointed out on BlueSky. Not a great look!
Barman isn’t leaving the company; she’ll stay on as the President of Vehicles to make sure deliveries commence, according to TechCrunch. Her move means there is now just one American car company led by a woman: Mary Barra at General Motors.
Nissan Gets A New Finance Guy To Curtail Losses
Nissan, like Volkswagen, hasn’t been doing great. At one point, one exec predicted the brand had “12 or 14 months to survive.” Since then, the Japanese brand nearly merged with Honda, then got a new CEO in Ivan Espinosa, who developed a multi-year cost-cutting campaign for the company that targets 20,000 job cuts and closing seven factories.
Nissan is still expected to post a loss for its fiscal calendar year ending in March, but since the cost-cutting efforts began, the company believes those losses won’t be as large. From Automotive News:
The forecasted operating loss, revised last month, is better than the ¥275 billion ($1.8 billion) in red ink it had forecast in November, but it reverses a ¥69.8 billion ($455.2 million) operating profit from the year before. Nissan is also forecasting a ¥650 billion ($4.2 billion) net loss.
That compares with a net loss of ¥670.9 billion ($4.4 billion) the year before.
Helping Espinosa with his quest was Jérémie Papin, who was appointed Nissan’s chief financial officer in January 2025. Just over a year later, Papin is stepping down for personal reasons and being replaced by Nissan finance veteran George Leondis. From Bloomberg:
Leondis joined Nissan in 2004 as head of finance for Australia. Since 2024 he’s been in Japan, where he’s led global product and industrial operations, as well as partnership financing and mergers and acquisitions.
He takes the role at a critical time for Nissan. While the carmaker’s brighter outlook has given Chief Executive Officer Ivan Espinosa a degree of breathing room, pressure is mounting on the company to refresh an aging lineup in order to reignite demand.
I like a lot of Nissan’s products right now, so I hope they can stick it out and turn things around.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
It’s really nice outside in New York right now, but I’m sad some of my favorite brands aren’t doing so great right now. So here’s “Summertime Sadness” from Lana Del Rey’s debut album, Born to Die.
The Big Question
Which platforms do you think Volkswagen will start sharing throughout its brands that it doesn’t already?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
Next headline Slates McKinsie bred CEO sells to PE, cashes in and PE takes a slap-chop to each department fastly and surely…
No denying that VW could be in better shape. But they still had a net profit of about $8billion. How much did other manufacturers, whose struggles are not so much of a favourite topic for the media as VW’s is? Like, for example, Ford, GM or Honda?
Amazon has invested exactly $0 in Slate Auto. Bezos Expeditions the company that manages Bezos personal investments has invested but only a portion of the $700m reported to have been raised as of late last year. So just stop with the whole Amazon investment.
I’m pretty worried about the business guy at Slate. I was confident in the company partly because the investors were hands-off. Now some guy who was on the board at one of those meal kit subscription companies (Blue Apron) is going to bring in some as-a-service, recurring revenue, vitality curve nonsense and make it act like a legacy automaker.
No other car company deserves to die more than Volkswagon. The lying cheating ancestor of Hitler and his scumbag industrialists.
But can we have Scout?
Look, if you want to hate on VW for it’s past, fine, I can’t stop you. But they aren’t alone. Every German and Austrian company that existed before WWII and still exists today was involved in the party’s machinations. Daimler/Mercedes-Benz, MAN, Porsche, Audi, Opel, BMW, Krupp, Steyr (Magna), and even Ford, as well as a slew of non-automotive companies. The same can be said of the Japanese. Mitsubishi, Toyota, Kawasaki, Isuzu, Hino, Nissan, Suzuki, Daihatsu, Mazda, Honda, and Subaru were all there in some capacity.
You forget the Hollerith machines of IBM.
I think Volkswagen’s actual ties to the Nazi regime are questionable, given that the company was basically seized assets from the occupation of Germany.
…is what I would say if they weren’t still tied with Porsche. I think they’re roughly at the level of Ford, in terms of the awkward ~1940s history.
Siemens and Bosch used concentration camp labor. Dow Chemical made Napalm. Alfred Noble invented dynamite. No one in the modern industrialized world is innocent.
Great, Slate is now run by a McKinsey guy. Say goodbye to any hope you had for this truck to be a basic, functional, repairable vehicle. It’ll be a locked-down Pickup As A Service before the first one rolls off the line.
Fucking executives/consultants who have never done anything real or useful in their lives. They turn everything they touch into temporarily-highly-profitable garbage.
Give the Slate a 3S-FE engine and I’ll buy one immediately. Although I just remembered that I don’t want to give Bezos any of my money if it can be avoided, so perhaps not.
Yeah, baldie found a way to fuck this up.
There are so many issues that have lead to Chinese success in bev and relative western failure along with what might bring many down. But the big thing is value. They all used to have value baked in.
Then they started chasing the premium and luxury segments which are a small portion of the market. The same thing happened with the Japanese came in they offered value and something people wanted. They all lost market share.
Going further back vw was able to do that because they had a value in the beetle. Their vans possibly. The ceos always react sometimes too late and or slow. GM always seems to be the chief reacator. With the corvair, vega, geo , Saturn , now their bev lineup.
One big thing people don’t always realize in China is the bev cars became the nice cars they have more features higher tech more premium and or luxury and don’t cost all that much more. Even if you look at the panda bev vs some of the cheap gas vehicles they are making the grampa cars. Large step up in quality and materials. It’s like going from a golf cart with tin doors to a bug or fiat 500. They were used to junky cars then got nice cars as phev or bev.
You still have some of the opposite ideas happening in the west. Vast amounts of people still view bev as cheap problematic short lived but overpriced. Changing peoples minds with regulations and companies producing something because of regulation / industry incentives doesn’t yeild the same effect as people who truly believe in what they are doing. Yes the Chinese regulated too but they already had the industry working and true believers along with the factories and supply chain that understood.
The slate shakeup is strange especially as startup Chris has been out in the media alot. It makes you wonder what is going on. Maybe a cash infusion involved someone to watch the cash. Hopefully that doesn’t mean a distroyed vision. Although if anyone should understand not making a profit for a while it should be Amazon people.
VAG will do what they all do go chase the most profitable and or biggest segment. So I expect more cuvs. Maybe phev. They already have the truck coming out and trucks in many markets. But a small VW pickup again in the US could be nice. Even cuv based. id.4 or whatever they are calling it now and meb did fairly well. Especially when they were able to be priced right.
Whatever they do they need a value that has quality. Especially now that people research every purchase. The line of thinking automobile reviewers that want certain things ruining cars is probably not far from the truth. But that seems to be changing as media as changing. Lots more real world opinions out there not just the classic how it did around a track in a car that will never see a track otherwise.
My simple plan to save Volkswagen:
1) Build interesting cars that don’t cost an arm and a leg.
2) If those cars do cost an arm and a leg, give ’em a bit more motor.
3) All those delightfully German complexities? Simplify them.
4) Price and style sell the first car. Durability of the first car sells the second one. Make them break less.
5) Don’t tell consumers what they are going to accept. Give them what they want. And that’s buttons, not haptic door “pulls.”
Amen. And help dealers understand how to treat customers
As someone who left Amazon last year (thankfully for another company, not a layoff), it’s concerning an Amazon exec is stepping in.
Thanks to Jasshole, Amazon is firmly on “day two” and won’t recover as he’s exactly the kind of person to promote failing upwards.
Any time an executive from a big tech company shows up, get ready for layoffs. It’s all they know how to do.
Hey, an ex-Amazon exec was put in charge of Stellantis’s powertrain engineering 5 years ago and that’s clearly when things took a turn for the…
Oh.
+1 on this. I left too albeit a bit earlier. This does not bode well for the Slate. I’m still rooting for them, but I wouldn’t bet on them.
I have noted on here before may or may not work by VW owned company and their have already been layoffs here and sitting in a finical meeting today we still yet did well enough (even though sales were down almost 30%) they are still giving out 38% of the annual incentive, for someone like me I only get 5% for the incentive so I only get like 1.8% but someone on a higher level (I am a level 4 and it goes up 5% every level after my level so a level 8 or 9 gets 25 or 30% so people making 500k+ a year get a bigger bonus while we get scraps) they did the same thing last year and furloughed us for 2 weeks so the same thing will most likely happen again this year. Gotta love it rich get richer but the working class is lucky to break even.
Do you think those higher level people did not work hard for what they are given now?
Sure some of them worked hard to get there but then you have other ones that are just failing upwards like we see at a lot of automotive companies. There are a lot of them that are just pushing their responsibilities on the workers. Also pretty ridiculous when you have high level execs making over a million a year and the company is doing terrible yet they pat themselves on in the back and they give themselves a giant bonus.
There’s a level at any company above which the hard work is not making widgets, but making the right decisions. When the people in those positions make the wrong decisions, I don’t see why we should reward them with a bonus.
If I were declared supreme dictator, I’d halt all pay for all c-suite execs in any year with lay-offs. Can’t grow responsibly and take care of the people who make your product? Suck it. You get nothing. I’m sure you’ll be fine on your over-inflated bonus from last year.
It’s impressive that Porsche can’t make a profit with how massively overpriced they are. I don’t know how much ore they can really platform share without making it obvious that so many brands are just tarted up VWs.
You have to give the incompetent CEOs bonuses and pay them to leave otherwise you’ll only attract incompetent CEOs to . . . wait a minute, no, that can’t be right, that wouldn’t make sense.
Overpriced and 90% of their lineup is just a 911 in a different trim. Like how are they desireable
I swear they make more special editions than they do standard cars and that’s not because they’re so limited in production.
I don’t get it, either. I’ve tried, but they’re the Camrys of sports cars to me. I don’t care about pointless numbers they can post, they’re a bland looking thing without any hint of passion in their creation beyond dumb historical architecture that stems from the ancient preceding car’s necessity of sharing a platform with an economy family car whose design prioritized packaging. There’s nothing surprising or inspired and the very choice of one is so blandly predictable. Seeing them at shows is like seeing ’57 Chevys in the early ’00s, just rows of yawn-inducing sameness displaying lack of imagination. The modern ones are oversized and cartoony looking, but in the goofy proportion way, not a fun way. They might be priced like exotics now, but that still doesn’t make them seem special, only massively overpriced. As for the old ones, there are so many other f’n cars one could buy instead, so many more interesting cars. Porsche themselves wanted to kill the damn 911 off several times, but the boring “Porschephiles” (really just 911 fetishists) had a fit, so Porsche became stagnant, stuck making a bunch of stuff with 911 styling no matter how poorly it translates to a particular body style.
Porsche of today is kind of like the broader VW group of the Piech era: they take what money they get from car sales, and burn it all in their R&D and motorsports divisions. E-turbos, synthetic fuel, the 918, the 919, the 963, the Mission R… Wonderful money pits.
It seems like a combination of poor management and bad luck. Much of that stuff should be handled by the parent company and motorsports shouldn’t be spread out over so many projects, but maybe that’s a German thing going by the Luftwaffe in WW2 having too many different and unusual projects (I love that, though, as not only did they come up with some awesome and even crazy things, but the division of resources was a contributor to them losing the war). They also got stiffed by jumping on EVs too early. In the US, I knew the EV push would fizzle and was one of the few defending Toyota’s strategy when most were criticizing them, but I’ll cut EU companies a little more slack on that as it seems like the EU is further ahead on EVs and more likely to hold to its plans.
VAG seems to be the very definition of a chicken running around with its head cut off. The company had its soul ripped out from its very heart once Dieselgate broke. Overinvestment in the EV space only pushed the knife in further and began twisting it.
VAG would do well to assess all of their brands and to maybe put one or two of the weakest ones up for sale. Perhaps both Audi and Porsche should be sold as a package deal.
There may also be entire markets which could be withdrawn from if VAG is struggling to maintain profits there too.
Finally, I think there’s a massive opportunity for VAG to expand the Skoda brand. Skoda makes some great vehicles at really great price points and would do well to launch that brand in markets where the affordable vehicle segment is lacking and sparse. However, I could see some hesitancy to have the Skoda brand be more successful than the parent VW brand.
I’m trying to be open to the idea of spinning off Porsche & Audi, after all, while they do share quite a bit of history with VW, they did use to be independent companies. But I just don’t know if that would actually make sense. Porsche does a lot of R&D, and Audi has pull in the premium segment that VW, Skoda, and Seat just don’t have.
If anything, I’d imagine cutting out Lamborghini, Bugatti, and/or Bentley would make more sense for VW. Lamborghini and Bugatti always stuck out like sore thumbs in the product portfolio, and for the most part, Bentley is just Audi wearing a smoking jacket, and I really don’t think that many people care about Bentley as a brand anymore (which is a shame, but not really a surprise).
As a current VW owner, I have to ask. Why would any North American buyer want a VW? I mean, they have some compelling products overseas. For years, you shopped VW for a nice semi premium small car. If you want a big bland CUV, why not just go with GM or Ford? VW has to just get back to being VW, at least here in North America. Stop chasing the heard when you can’t run fast enough anyway.
As for platform sharing, I think in someways they have to go in the other direction. Pare Porsche down to 2 or 3 model lines and leave them on unique platforms. Charge a fortune for them (they are anyway) and make the profit that way. Same with Bentley and Lamborghini. Share platforms across VW/Audi/Skoda/Seat etc. etc. etc. and go for volume there. Hell I rode in a couple new(ish) Seats recently and they were hardly any different than my VW and not in a bad way. They just wasted money on some different stampings/molds for body panels and interior trim. They could have saved a lot by just swapping the badges.
They could just swap the badges, but that would make those marques redundant. There’s precedent for that in the graveyard of brands that once lived under GM and British Leyland
A certain amount is just supporting regional markets. You don’t see many VWs in Spain, just Seats, built there and sold through that dealer network. Audi and Skoda do get around more, but some of that could be managed by trim levels. In the US the big three badge engineered pretty much to support separate dealer chains and perceived market positions. I’d hazard a guess that most people could tell the product was essentially the same.
They could also just jettison some of the brands. Hearsay!!!
Yeah, the US was about supplying the individual dealers with a full range of cars and it worked well until they started making them essentially the same car with trim variations. Though that still lasted longer than it probably should have thanks to the momentum of a diehard domestic audience. VW could keep the regional brands as rebadges, but I don’t know how that works in markets where the multiple brands are sold. While brand loyalty would persist, it’s not what it used to be, so I think it would hurt the dealers of whatever the more expensive brand is. From the US with no familiarity with Skoda or SEAT, it seems like they differentiate Skoda as the more budget and rugged brand and SEAT as being more sporty and they look distinct. Changing that, I agree, they basically become trim levels, which is GM and Leyland again. Ultimately, while I think there are far too many brands with no real purpose anymore and some of them need to go or their parent company has to get serious about a revival, it seems like SEAT and Skoda are doing well enough to stick around, but if that’s to remain for the long term, I think it requires keeping them a bit distinct. As for their other brands, I agree they probably have too many, but it’s a bad market to unload any into. Lamborghini, Bentley, and Bugatti are all profitable. I can’t see them dumping Porsche, nor do i think they should, I think it just needs to be downsized a bit. Audi? What is Audi’s purpose anymore? I guess it occupies that midrange, but it’s not doing well and I wonder if it’s worth bothering to turn it around. Then again, the politics and perception of shuttering it might make it a cent smart/euro poor decision. Eh, I’m not a CEO and nobody’s evaluating me for the position, so it doesn’t matter what I think and I’m kind of glad. As much as I’d like the money, that’s a lot of responsibility and I wouldn’t want to have to lay people off.
Take the erev drivetrain from scout and put a one motor version in it as a low cost fwd cuv. Next a rwd sedan, and finally a 2 motor AWD hot hatch and CUV. No off road ( leave that to scout) but snow and high performance AWD capability. Like scout build with level 2 charging and at least 100 miles battery only.
The e rev from scout looks to be a great choice, but not everyone wants a large, off-road four wheel drive monster. A small efficient reef choice is still needed.
And for Christ’s sake, wireless carplay and aa…and NO fs&#$king subscriptions!
Hear me out VW. Put kitchen’s in all your dealerships and add a walk up window.
Sell the famous VW currywurst at all your dealerships. It will increase your foot traffic, get people interested in your cars and bring the VW name back in the conversation. At least here in the US, we need a currywurst stand in every city ( at least every city with a VW dealer)
The sad thing is their consultants will tell them to “Americanize” the currywurst and it will just end up being boiled Oscar Meyer hot dogs in yellow mustard.
You just described the VW Atlas!
I think you accidentally insulted hot dogs with mustard
Which platforms do you think Volkswagen will start sharing throughout its brands that it doesn’t already?
ID.Buzz. Maybe someone can shove some more batteries in it, and build a more retro exterior
I think we can all agree that tariffs are the least of Audi’s problems with marketshare in the US.
I can’t find a single reason for optimism in this paragraph. Godspeed, people who were looking forward to the Slate.
“Volkswagen’s CEO Just Admitted Its Business Model Doesn’t Work Anymore”
Who would have thought that building soulless pieces of sh*t wasn’t a good business model.
In all fairness, though, the quality and engineering might be substandard, but at least they look horrible and cost too much.
Almost all of VW’s problems are self inflicted, so I have zero sympathy for them. They have been shit for years, but it all seemed to have accelerated with Dieselgate.
Tariffs are an issue for them because they didn’t want to build plants in North America. The Chinese are a problem they helped create when 20+ years ago they were teaching the Chinese how to design and build cars at a time when Chinese car technology was on par with a tuk-tuk. So they traded short term access to the Chinese domestic market for long term survival. And they were making money hand-over-fist for years so they could have invested in keeping their vehicles modern and well-received, but instead they sat on their asses.
“but instead they sat on their asses.”
That’s a little harsh. The execs were likely standing when they were supervising the packing of their golden parachutes which they’ll be deploying over the next couple of years.
Other than that you are right on.
Absolutely and someone was probably kissing those asses since companies this large almost universally are full of yes-men.
Now the regular workers have to pay the price for the incompetence of those executives.
My schadenfreude is getting worn out seeing all of the dumbass companies who used to rely on Chinese sales to butter their bread now getting their asses handed to them by the same Chinese companies they sold their IP to for some balance sheet bloat.
This was obvious to anyone with about a 3rd grade education, but some grossly overcompensated C-suite fucktards couldn’t do the math.
Yeah it’s been known for literally decades now, but short term greed supersede common sense. Of course the CEOs who started all this tend to now be long gone, having retired with massive amounts of money in their bank accounts.
I used to work for a multi-national that once issued a requirement that all preventative maintenance on equipment be suspended for a year… turns out it was the CEO’s final year on contract and the cost savings for stopping preventative maintenance was enough to give his end-of-contract bonus a massive boost. The year after he left was pretty bad…
Making Dieselgate possible shows how bad things were as a corporate culture. Running the scam for decades made the rot part of their DNA and now they’re reaping what they’ve sown. And it’s a damn shame for the good engineers and competent car people who would want to make cool things.
They never cleared-house to the extent that they should have, nor did any governments punish the top level executives as severely as they should have. A quick search says that just 6 individuals were imprisoned. Two in the US saw 7 years, and in Germany just four individuals with their sentences ranging from just 2 years to 4.5 years.
That’s a goddamn joke.
If not for the hundred thousand other workers who would get hurt, I would love to see VW go belly-up. They absolutely deserve it.