Ethical Issues In The Automotive Industry Case Study

While the automotive industry is touted as a success story of industrialisation, and the early days of automated assembly brought mobility to millions of people and fast-forwarded our society in ways we had never previously imagined possible, since the beginning, the automotive industry has been rife with ethical challenges. Some of these have been very public ones, typically involving labour practices, worker safety and issues of product safety over cost. However, there is another ethical challenge in the arena, and it is not small. It is the issue of environmental impact. Building cars takes a considerable toll on the environment, while the product itself generates so much waste that environmentalists now measure carbon output of other disputed industries in terms of how

Global competition in the automotive industry has responded to consumer demand for less-polluting cars in what often appears to be a dismayingly-money oriented fashion. An example of this would be the case of evading regulation by German company VW, which installed a device that appears to have “tricked” the EPA into passing cars that did not actually meet clean air act standards (Bomey, 2015). The US government reacted very negatively to this, but not before passing thousands of cars on to consumers. VW is currently embroiled in huge lawsuits while the US government and EPA has taken the opportunity to make public statements about the need to control emissions and to better regulate industry. This would be encouraging if only the US was actually responding to the global climate crisis with regulations that were realistic. It is becoming more and more easy to assume the EPA is, as many have suggested, controlled by the oil lobby and so fails to direct the need for an affordable, mass-marketed zero-emission (fossil-fuel free) automobile nor does it properly and substantially subsidize