Green Illusions Fell an Auto CEO

Following-up from earlier, "U.S. Taxpayers Duped Out of $51 Million in Green Subsidies for Volkswagen 'Clean' Cars (VIDEO)."

Now here's Holman Jenkins, at WSJ, "Volkswagen bet its U.S. future on curing American drivers of their aversion to diesel":

What puzzled a business columnist five years ago remains puzzling today. Martin Winterkorn, the now-embattled Volkswagen chief, grandly pronounced a goal to make VW the world’s biggest car maker by sales. Shouldn’t a business manager care about whether capital is productively deployed to maximize returns, not about generating sales volume for its own sake?

Mr. Winterkorn might have noticed, for one thing, that the sales crown had been associated with catastrophe for its two most recent wearers, Toyota and GM. Mr. Winterkorn would need to find a bigger place for VW in the U.S. market—and bowdlerized a car that had earned a small but devoted fandom in the U.S., the Jetta, cheapening it into a Corolla wannabe. His U.S.-tailored Passat landed with a thud just as fuel prices were falling and American families were turning to small SUVs instead.

VW at least had learned something from a previous foray in the U.S. market. In the late 1970s, the company tried to recover its plummeting market share by opening a UAW-staffed factory in New Stanton, Pa. That plant was a disaster from day one and closed a few years later. This time, VW built its plant in Tennessee in pursuit of well-behaved, nonunion labor. Yet there followed an attempt at self-sabotage of the sort that inspires feature stories in women’s magazines: To appease labor back in Germany, VW tried to slip the UAW into the factory through the backdoor anyway, only to be prevented by its own U.S. workers.

All this now becomes preamble to the scandal that completes the disaster of Mr. Winterkorn’s tenure: His admission that VW used a software trick to fool U.S. emissions tests even while its diesel-engined Volkswagens on U.S. roads put out many times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxides.

Any chief executive can have bad luck, but these were poor decisions: To alienate the company’s residual U.S. fans by downgrading the Jetta with a cheap rear axle. To blithely insert the company in the partisan fault-line that divides the union-dominated northern U.S. auto industry and the nonunion south, and to do so directly in the wake of the inflammatory GM and Chrysler bailouts.

But beggaring belief is the latest scandal, committed in the service of a dubious marketing strategy from the get-go. This was VW’s bet that it could cure Americans of their aversion to diesel by flogging the car’s supposed “green” credentials. Unpropitiously, the company launched its bet as gasoline engines were catching up with diesel engines in efficiency, and when diesel fuel is pricier than gasoline and harder to find.

Yet Mr. Winterkorn was reconfirmed in his control as recently as April, when a board fight prompted the exit of VW’s eminence grise, Chairman Ferdinand Piëch, who built the modern company and had begun to criticize Mr. Winterkorn’s American endeavors. Mr. Winterkorn’s key ally in ejecting Mr. Piëch was labor representative Bernd Osterloh, also his partner in the UAW fiasco. That should tell you something.

Mr. Winterkorn may be on his way out but not before he all but pleaded guilty on the company’s behalf to the emissions-cheating charges, which, coming from the EPA, might normally deserve skepticism...

Keep reading, and remember, leftism is built on a lie. And the dues for doing the devil's work keep coming due.