We party of Merkel is great for "stability". But this stability also means everything bad will stay bad and stuff like policing lobbyism is not a priority for those politicians, because they are good enough to hide it and profit from it so much, that they don't want it to change at all. Worse, we even have one party FDP which is really small, but openly pushes against policing lobbyism and they are the second or third largest benefactor of huge lobby donations.
The powerful want to stay powerful. If you ask the normal citizen they would want things to change at least to make everything more right.
The third point is also quite critical. The biggest industry in Germany is car manufacturing. And because of this every change here might disrupt millions of people, potential voters, and harm the industry. The reason germany did not come up with a great Tesla competitor or even Tesla itself is because of that. Everything moves so slow in these companies, they depend on so many other companies to get you some part of your car and then in the end assemble it all, that any change will disrupt too much and gets killed before it can bud.
In both countries there is a marked willingness to do the right thing, but I'm struggling to remember corruption anywhere close to the size of what goes on there.
Also, since 2008 the point is mostly moot. See Bad Banks.
And there we have politics. Let them crash and burn, or try for another turn, in the game of boom and bust?
What is to earn, who is to trust?
Nobody knows anymore. It's all yearn and lore.
I'd make the argument that in these countries there are fewer of these incidents and that they become public at a higher rate, and that the public shame is greater than in countries like the US where we know it happens but there will never be any actual public dialog, let alone recourse. Mental exercise: If either of those scandals had happened in the US, what would have been the outcome? For comparison, notice the way that Monsanto managed to export their "trouble" over glyphosate to Bayer, where it escalated into a scandal.
People always rely on some governmental authority. When it affects them, that is. Otherwise, no one gives a shit about anything.
It is also custom here to voice one's opinion in extreme precision or detail. "Hinterfragen" question things, criticise, always down to the details. Not in an emotional way but very in a very matter-of-fact sense.
So think of it from the perspective of "if the rule is that you don't cross on red, then why are you crossing on red? It's against the rule". It's not personal at all.
That being said, in fact in Germany, pedestrians cross an empty road at night on a red light fairly regularly. Or they just cross at random place, not through the pedestrian crossing despite that one being fairly close and being red. I have seen that both. And I have done both, no one told me anything.
It's like in Saudi Arabia, where of course nobody drinks alcohol, it's haram! But then the sheikhs have the craziest parties with hookers and 10k usd champagne etc.
The SW is done and millions of vehicles have the feature. Don't count on other engineer to spot the cheat because everyone has a specific area of expertise, and the software is closely related to the engine hardware. It is very difficult to understand the purpose of each piece of code.
Remember that at that time, noone was ever tried for cheating the exhaust norms and the compliance team only cared about financial fraud.
No national government was interested in rigorously enforcing the regulations to the detriment of their own nation's industry.
This is a core issue with the political structure of the EU in general, and isn't even specific to cars.
The same for indicating lane changes, or turning of wheeled traffic.
With the exception of a few so called hidden champions german engineering is a myth now.
It can't be any different, because shareholder value and time to market rules,
the prekariat has neither time nor ability for deep thought,
which isn't tought anymore, or not as it once has been.
It's mostly all superficial pretense now.
Learning to forget, only to get some paper which says so.
But we can be fantastic fanboiz!
Cheers! :-)
edit: make that something like 80/20 or 90/10, or anything in between.
edit: also regional variations, as always, but the trend is there.
Everywhere.
Yes: the fact that many other automakers all over the world were caught as well, but you only remember VW. And my guess is that for the ones that weren't caught it was just that: they weren't caught.
Basically, European politicians had created every tighter fuel and emissions standards that really couldn't be met (the leaner you burn the more NOx and other nasties, if you want to burn cleaner, you need a richer mixture). So enforcement of those standards was "wink wink, nudge, nudge", and everyone was in on it.
Except the pesky Americans.
Buying gas from Russia is sensible, see "Ostpolitik".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostpolitik
Phasing out nuclear and increasing coal is just nuts. Nuclear should, if anything, be expanded, but it's the third rail of German politics. The populace has been so brainwashed on this topic that logic just doesn't apply. Kinda like guns in the US.
The financial class in most countries sees itself as above the law. Cumex was worse in many ways, but what the banks have been doing in the US, Japan or the UK is hardly better. In fact, the US legal system officially declined to pursue HSBC's brazen money laundering, because going after the bank might lead to financial instability. Carte Blanche. And don't get me started on Goldman Sachs.
Heck, the moneyed classes in the UK took the country out of the EU, never mind the enormous economic, social and political damage, in order to avoid EU transparency laws.
VW wasn't the only having tweaked emissions, VW was the only one having clearly cheated. that's why they are remembered for it.
"Well obviously they cared about losing their job, we need strong worker protections and unions."
"We just need a culture of calling people out on anti-social behavior, whether or not that specific transgression is already codified."
"We need strong regulations that penalize corner cutting."
But ... Germany is really good on all those points! So, if this kind of thing slips through there...
The individual low level employees are about as culpable for the emissions cheating as the muscle cells of a serial killer are for murdering someone. They hold no meaningful decision making power within the organization and operate according to the local incentive structure. The executives responsible for shaping the incentive structure are the ones who should be individually penalized. Market forces would help with this if illegal practices were appropriately costly.
As long as you pay your taxes you're free to do whatever you want.
No one will help you, no one will get in your way.
The occasional cranky old guy calling the cops on a party is not representative of the whole society.
Like, at a community level, the average German citizen takes it upon themselves to speak out when they feel anyone is acting anti-socially. Which I admire!
But then Dieselgate, the Wirecard scandal, and a bunch of other non-nonsensical activities (immense coal energy industry, buying gas from Russia and general lack of large scale green policy) just seem so far removed from the Germany I know.
I really don't understand how something like Dieselgate can happen at the scale that it did. And Wirecard too - with BaFin even stepping in to harass the investigative journalists from the FT.
Is there something I am missing here?