Volkswagen loses its moral compass was the headline of a Times article the other week about the latest scandal to hit the truly awful German car-maker when, as article noted:
"... it emerged that VW and other German manufacturers had resorted to gassing monkeys as part of research into the effects of diesel fumes on humans. The New York Times and other media revealed that VW, BMW and Daimler had clubbed together to finance an experiment in which 10 macaque monkeys from Java were packed into small airtight chambers and forced to watch cartoons while breathing in fumes from a VW Beetle."
adding:
"Whatever the legal or moral issues of the monkey-torturing affair, it is hard to think of a more numbingly inept stratagem for any modern German company than to associate itself with a gas chamber. Yet VW, for all its technical skills, has a long history of dubious schemes, and for many both inside and outside the country last week the primate-gassing debacle provided further evidence of an alarming moral void at the heart of German industry."
James Lewisohn has an informative Spectator article on the history of the promotion of diesel within the EU, and, in an article in the Telegraph on the health ramifications of all this, Professor Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, is quoted as saying:
"These companies have blood on their hands – I say that without any doubt. The number of early fatalities in Britain is really very, very large due to NOx (nitrogen oxides) [in the] air, with governments across Europe encouraging diesel on the basis that the catalyst traps worked."
Meanwhile, the UK government just fiddles around as Client Earth notes.
I am appalled at how the German government has connived at protecting all this criminality, and I have resolved never to buy a German car again. I am surely not alone in this.
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