VW Group make another move towards ‘green’ by hiring ‘an activist’
Imagine Greta Thunberg in a suit shouting at executives in boardroom meetings. Well, that’s how we imagine it anyway.
VW have gone from being dirty rotten liars who installed devices in their cars to cheat emission testing, to a ‘green’ company that cares about the planet we live on. Well, that’s what they want us to think at least.
In their latest PR move, Volkswagen have announced that they are looking to hire a full-time, in-house climate activist to challenge the company’s prospects.
This comes straight from Herbert Diess, the chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen Group.
“I’m looking to hire an activist,”
“We have so many ideas, but they take too long to implement in our big organisation, so I need someone really aggressive internally.” “We are too slow,”
“We have established management teams in strategy departments, in communication departments, and many others and I think we need some more internal challenges.”
Diess said:
It gets even more shocking because the lucky guy or gal that lands this job will have direct access to Diess himself, as well as access to other high-up VW executives. This is a rather unusual and rare move, according to Financial Times, making us a little sceptical as to whether this is anything more than a PR stunt.
Ever since the aforementioned Dieselgate, the huge VW emissions scandal that happened in 2015, VW have been on the straight and narrow. They created an all-electric race car and broke several world records, stopped developing combustion engines for Motorsport, created a goal of having 22 million electric cars on the road by 2030, said they will invest €10 billion in ride-sharing technology and even announced plans to invest as much as €30 billion in electric mobility.
It’s only forecasted to get greener from here as well, with VW Group’s first EV set to release this year (the VW ID.3) and more to follow. Now, with the addition of a potential in-house climate activist, we will have probably forgotten all about the company’s scandalous past.
It is unclear exactly what this ‘activist’ will be employed to do and what their daily responsibilities will be. As a rough guess though, they will likely sit amongst the rest of VW Group’s advisory board.
Interestingly, VW already employs some professional environmentalists such as former EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard and former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency Margo Oge.
Could this move suggest that VW are simply arming themselves better for future backlash? Are they just making sure that if Dieselgate happens again, they’ll be better prepared? Or is the German manufacturing giant truly looking to change its ways?
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Very unlikely VW are doing this or anything else because they’ve suddenly become a nice company.