What the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal Reveals About the Hidden Pressures Facing Comms Teams
Something Didn’t Smell Right
The black Volkswagen Jetta rumbled down a California highway, its engine humming steadily as Marc Besch balanced a laptop on his knees. The data flickered, but the numbers weren’t making sense. Besch and his colleagues, Arvind Thiruvengadam and Hemanth Kappanna, engineers from West Virginia University, had been tasked with measuring real-world emissions from diesel cars.
Volkswagen had staked its global comeback on so-called “Clean Diesel” engines—technology that promised high performance with low environmental impact. But here on the open road, the Jetta’s emissions weren’t just slightly off. They were surging to levels that should have been impossible: as much as 40 times the legal limit.
At first, the team questioned their equipment. Then they questioned their methodology. But test after test confirmed the same pattern. In controlled lab environments, the vehicles passed with flying colors. But out here, in the real world, they were polluting at industrial levels. It wasn’t a glitch.
It was a lie.
The Perfect Deception
Volkswagen had built its narrative carefully. In a market increasingly driven by environmental concerns, the company saw an opportunity to lead. Climate credibility had become a commercial asset, and “Clean Diesel” was their golden ticket. The messaging was sharp: High performance without the environmental guilt. Efficiency. Responsibility. Precision.
But the cars weren’t clean. Deep inside the engine control software, Volkswagen had installed a “defeat device”—code that could detect when the vehicle was being tested in a lab and trigger full emissions controls. Once the test was over, those controls were switched off. On the road, the cars drove like any other diesel, quietly spewing nitrogen oxides far beyond legal thresholds.
The ruse worked for years. Regulators were impressed. Environmental awards were handed out. Sales soared.
And then a second-hand Jetta with a laptop on the passenger seat broke it all apart.
The Unraveling
The West Virginia research team handed over their findings to the California Air Resources Board, who brought in the EPA. When regulators approached Volkswagen for clarification, the company stalled. They offered technical explanations, promised to investigate, delayed disclosures.
Behind closed doors, communications staff tried to hold the line. There were talking points. Carefully worded statements. Phrases like “technical irregularities” and “unexpected emissions behavior.” But the walls were closing in.
When the EPA finally threatened to withhold approval for the 2016 models, Volkswagen caved. On Sept. 18, 2015, the world learned that the company had installed defeat devices in 11 million vehicles.
The fallout was immediate. CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned. Stock prices collapsed. Billions in fines and legal settlements followed. Volkswagen became synonymous with corporate deception.
Inside the Pressure Cooker
Most retellings of the scandal focus on the software, the executives, the scale of the lie. But inside Volkswagen, another story was playing out: the story of a comms team trying to hold back a flood with a thimble.
When journalists began asking questions in early 2015, there was no central record of past statements to refer to. Regional comms teams contradicted one another. Some spokespeople stuck to the original script, others tried to get ahead of the story, and the resulting coverage was chaotic. Internally, email chains stretched for pages as staff tried to determine what had already been said publicly.
Media requests came in through half a dozen channels. No one could say for sure whether the head of sustainability had spoken with a German business paper or whether the quote making the rounds on Twitter had ever been cleared.
By the time the truth emerged, Volkswagen had lost more than control of the narrative. It had lost credibility—not because it lied once, but because it couldn’t get its story straight.
What Broadsight Could Have Changed
No tool can stop a company from lying. But when the pressure starts to mount, the difference between reputational survival and collapse often comes down to whether the comms team has what it needs to respond with clarity.
Broadsight was built for that reality. It gives external comms teams a single source of truth:
- Every media inquiry, logged and searchable.
- Every response, tracked and versioned.
- Every quote, tied to the person who said it, with the context in which it was given.
It offers a real-time view of who’s asking what, what’s already been said and how narratives are evolving. Instead of pulling together reactive talking points, teams can rely on structured media history to shape their next move.
If Volkswagen had a system like Broadsight, its comms team might have caught the contradictions early. They could have aligned messaging, flagged inconsistencies and advised leadership with confidence. Would that have stopped the scandal? No. But it could have kept them from fumbling their way through it in full view of the public.
The Real Lesson
The Volkswagen scandal wasn’t just an engineering failure. It was a failure of internal coordination, transparency and readiness.
And for external comms teams, it’s a cautionary tale: The truth will come out, and when it does, you need to know exactly what you said yesterday, last week and six months ago.
Because once the smoke starts to rise, it’s too late to organize your inbox.
Request a demo of Broadsight and see how it helps comms teams stay ahead of the narrative—before it takes on a life of its own.
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