You’re an automaker who lied again and again about your emissions testing. You’ve paid more than $33 billion in fines and to buy back many of the 11 million cars you lied about.
Your chief executive officer was forced out, saying he was “deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public.”
Your head of U.S. operations left, too, saying the company “was dishonest with the EPA, and the California Air Resources Board and with all of you.”
So what do you do for an encore? You lie about changing your name from “Volkswagen” to “Voltswagen,” and then you lie and lie and lie when reporters specifically ask you if the name change is real. You even do a press release that quotes the head of U.S. operations lying as he announced the name change–in short, the guy who took the job of the guy fired because of VW’s lies.
Reporters on March 30, 2021, two days before April Fool’s Day, dutifully reported what you say, because the only source that would know for sure said it’s true. Reporters cannot independently verify whether you are telling the truth, so they have no choice but to trust you.
And now you’re in either in trouble or should be. Either way, you are morally deficient.
News organizations, hesitant a mere five years ago to call official pronouncements a lie when the leader of the free world wasn’t telling the truth, did not hesitate to call this a lie.
Here are some headlines:
►An unwelcome prank: Volkswagen purposely hoodwinks reporters. The Associated Press story noted that VW public relations practitioners paid liars told the AP, USA Today, and others that the change was real when they knew (or should have known) it was not real. A (truth-telling) PR person for the Associated Press said: “This and any deliberate release of false information hurts accurate journalism and the public good.”
►VW lied to sell diesels; now it lied to sell EVs. Automotive News, another trade publication, wasn’t happy, either. A writer there said on Twitter: “All future VW press releases should be subject to a 3-day waiting period before any news organization reports them as fact.”
►Volkswagen Lied About Voltswagen, And It Shouldn’t Have. The Motor1 blog wrote: “After four years of battling fake news, we found the company’s decision to mislead the press in service of its joke tone deaf.” (The company had two posts believing VW’s lie, including “Volkswagen Changing Name To Voltswagen, This Is Not A Joke” on March 29.)
The Wall Street Journal later quoted a PR guy in Germany who said the company saying the company “didn’t mean to mislead anyone. The whole thing is just a marketing action to get people talking” about a new VW electric vehicle headed toward the market. The company posted the “news” of its name change on its web site, caught the attention of a few news organizations, and then took down the “news.” VW tweeted about it, too. It changed the name on its website.
Not everyone was impressed, particularly the reporters who cover the company on a regular basis.
“This was not a joke,” USA Today reporter Nathan Bomey wrote on Twitter. “It was deception. In case you haven’t noticed, we have a misinformation problem in this country. Now you’re part of it. Why should anyone trust you again?”
It’s unclear if lying carries legal complications, even though Volkswagen shares jumped nearly 5% in the hours after the “news” broke. The AP story quotes one expert saying the Securities and Exchange Commission should look into it, and another who says the SEC likely would not.
And this can’t be excused because of April Fool’s Day, either, and not just because this happened in March. April Fool’s ought not to be a joke to professional truthtellers. (And if you don’t believe that, then you should go home right because your house is on fire, or your favorite celebrity is about to call you and wish you a happy day.)
Either way, VW got what it wanted: More people now know that VW will be peddling a new electronic car before too long. As of this writing, it has not apologized for lying. It tweeted that this April Fool’s effort in March “got the whole world buzzing,” and that “people talking about electric driving and our new ID.4 can only be a good thing.”
That’s a lie, too. It is not a good thing.
Let’s quote another German guy, or at least one from Prussia before it became Germany. Immanuel Kant wrote this in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785: “For all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves” (p. 41).
Volkswagen — whether faking emissions information, producing ads that it later apologizes for because of racist implications, or lying to reporters to get their name in the news — continues failing to treat people with the respect and honesty that we deserve simply because we are human. Or, volks.
And that’s no lie.