“You can’t change a culture overnight” – VW board member

Two years after the dieselgate emissions fraud scandal broke, Germany’s largest carmaker VW has initiated a thorough transformation of its structure but will still need some time to adapt, VW board member Andreas Renschler says in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel. “You can’t change a culture overnight”, Renschler argues, saying that the scandal has helped set in motion a process “that would have been necessary anyway”. The company already had a variety of clean cars on offer, “but that hasn’t been met with a lot of interest” by customers, he says. Renschler argues that the lack of charging infrastructure is one of the greatest obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles, yet installing charging stations is “not the carmakers’ duty”.

Read the interview in German here.

See the CLEW factsheets “Dieselgate” – a timeline of Germany’s emissions fraud scandal and The debate over an end to combustion engines in Germany.