Dieselgate: How They Covered Volkswagen With 11 million infected cars and over $18 billion in fines on the line, Volkswagen's recent diesel debacle is the largest-scale scandal ever to face the automotive world, with lawsuits, retroactive taxing, and brand damage that will limit the automotive leviathan for years to come. With so much of the German economy hinging on the automotive sector, the fate of Volkswagen will have widespread impacts on the global market, so fair and proportional coverage of this scandal is vital. The New York Times, famous for setting the tone of the day's news, displayed the scandal on the front page. The Times talked in depth about how the cars were able to defeat emissions tests while sparing the less automotively-inclined
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The blog focused strongly on the internals of the car and how exactly the test-rigging worked, not mentioning the global economic implications of the scandal. Jalopnik republished a picture from Autoblog, putting the emissions in perspective. The Volkswagen Golf TDI, the graphic stated, was said to produce the same amount of Nitrogen Oxide as a Honda Civic during EPA tests, but real world driving created the same amount of pollutants as 84 Ford F-450 pickup trucks put together. In the days after the news broke, Jalopnik published articles detailing the ways in which VW cheated, rather than the causes and effects of the scandal. Contributor Raphael Orlove explains that cars are emissions tested in a controlled environment, with the drive wheels placed on a dyno (a machine that allows cars to spin their wheels while remaining stationary). While on these machines, two wheels stay still while the others move. “And a car’s stability and traction control systems don’t like the idea of your front wheels speeding along with your back wheels going zero miles per hour,” he writes, “So the VW has a testing mode in its electronic brain that says everything is okay.” This, then, explains how VW got away with installing defeat devices – most cars have special ECU settings for testing, Volkswagen just injected some malicious code in the program. Finally, …show more content…
The New York Times, similar in scope to the German paper, has over 100 articles on this subject. Opinion pieces, cartoons, deep diving explanations, and more have graced the website consistently since the scandal broke. Jalopnik, with a staff of less than 10 writers, has published over 25 stories on the matter. Der Spiegel has published two. The nation’s largest corporation has been placed in an existence-threatening conundrum, and searching on the site yields only one article on the topic. You can seemingly only find the other article by search engine. The first is an opinion piece, dated over a week after the scandal, and the second is a news story dated 12 days after the big incident. While some of this can be attributed to the paper mainly being in German and not publishing all articles in English, this still is a massive oversight or an intentional move to not defame the nation’s pride. Der Spiegel is also limited in scope, focusing mainly on the effect on Germany. The German state where Volkswagen is headquartered, Lower Saxony, the paper reports, has a 20% stake in Volkswagen Auto Group. Unlike the other sources, the first new piece started with good news, opening an article with, “Tuesday saw the first piece of good news in quite some time for Volkswagen. The company's board of directors was meeting, under the leadership of freshly installed CEO Matthias Müller, and developers were
The blog focused strongly on the internals of the car and how exactly the test-rigging worked, not mentioning the global economic implications of the scandal. Jalopnik republished a picture from Autoblog, putting the emissions in perspective. The Volkswagen Golf TDI, the graphic stated, was said to produce the same amount of Nitrogen Oxide as a Honda Civic during EPA tests, but real world driving created the same amount of pollutants as 84 Ford F-450 pickup trucks put together. In the days after the news broke, Jalopnik published articles detailing the ways in which VW cheated, rather than the causes and effects of the scandal. Contributor Raphael Orlove explains that cars are emissions tested in a controlled environment, with the drive wheels placed on a dyno (a machine that allows cars to spin their wheels while remaining stationary). While on these machines, two wheels stay still while the others move. “And a car’s stability and traction control systems don’t like the idea of your front wheels speeding along with your back wheels going zero miles per hour,” he writes, “So the VW has a testing mode in its electronic brain that says everything is okay.” This, then, explains how VW got away with installing defeat devices – most cars have special ECU settings for testing, Volkswagen just injected some malicious code in the program. Finally, …show more content…
The New York Times, similar in scope to the German paper, has over 100 articles on this subject. Opinion pieces, cartoons, deep diving explanations, and more have graced the website consistently since the scandal broke. Jalopnik, with a staff of less than 10 writers, has published over 25 stories on the matter. Der Spiegel has published two. The nation’s largest corporation has been placed in an existence-threatening conundrum, and searching on the site yields only one article on the topic. You can seemingly only find the other article by search engine. The first is an opinion piece, dated over a week after the scandal, and the second is a news story dated 12 days after the big incident. While some of this can be attributed to the paper mainly being in German and not publishing all articles in English, this still is a massive oversight or an intentional move to not defame the nation’s pride. Der Spiegel is also limited in scope, focusing mainly on the effect on Germany. The German state where Volkswagen is headquartered, Lower Saxony, the paper reports, has a 20% stake in Volkswagen Auto Group. Unlike the other sources, the first new piece started with good news, opening an article with, “Tuesday saw the first piece of good news in quite some time for Volkswagen. The company's board of directors was meeting, under the leadership of freshly installed CEO Matthias Müller, and developers were