The Volkswagen emissions scandal hasn’t really harmed the company’s reputation inside its home country, a new survey finds.
Nearly two-thirds of Germans said that Volkswagen still makes “outstanding cars.”
From Reuters:
Sixty-five percent said they either fully or largely agreed the scandal was overdone and that VW still made excellent cars, according to results of an independent online survey of 1,000 people published on Monday by market research firm Prophet.
Six out of 10 said they did not believe the “Made in Germany” label would be damaged by the scandal in the long term, and 63 percent believed the affair would soon be forgotten.
The scandal that rocked the auto industry saw Volkswagen admit to fitting its diesel vehicles with software so they could beat emissions tests.
The software, known as a ‘defeat device’, allowed the cars to beat lab tests, but it was revealed that the cars emitted 40 times what they tested at when driving around in the wild.
The scandal caused Volkswagen’s stock price to plummet and the company’s CEO Martin Winterkorn was forced to resign. Volkswagen has publicly announced plans to spend at least $7.3 billion on fixing the emissions issues, and the company’s U.S. CEO Michael Horn was recently grilled by Congress about said plans.
The scandal recently claimed its fifth executive, as the company suspended its top quality-control executive on Tuesday.
While many Germans feel that the whole thing will soon be forgotten, Volkswagen has a long way to go in terms of repairing the damage caused by the deception.
And it won’t help that Leonardo DiCaprio is taking the whole story to the big screen.