Volkswagen shows two sides of pushy culture

London

THE scandal at Volkswagen might look like the sort of stupid mistake that could easily have been avoided. Not so. The carmaker's installation of unauthorised and illegal software capable of falsifying emissions test results in 11.5 million vehicles is the sort of problem that highly successful companies find very difficult to avoid.

Start with an obvious point: fiddling emissions was clearly not a good idea. Such defeat devices were explicitly banned in the European Union in 2007 and had not been tolerated by US regulators for decades. VW itself had a run-in with the Environmental Protection Agency on a switch that limited emissions back in 1973, the Wall Street Journal reported. Then there was a 2007 letter from parts supplier Bosch warning of possible foul play, as reported in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag. In 2011, VW's supervisory board received warnings of manipulation, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported.