Edit: Thanks for the clarifications, all. Although he assumed Ferdinand Piëch's former position as chairman in April 2015, he was VW's CEO since 2007.
He has been CEO since 2007, before any of the VW models with defeat devices were introduced.
Some of the German analysts and experts who are knowledgeable about the industry itself have said that there is not even the slightest chance that he didn't know this.
There's an interesting talk in German here:
Edit: Winterkorn took over as chairman of the supervisory board of VW in April, but as petewailes pointed out, he's been CEO since 2007, so his resignation makes more sense.
This is about taking a fall. It's up to the courts (I assume, American, not German) to establish how much he is actually at fault. But the idea that they sold 11M vehicles with hardware cheating the emissions test makes his claim fairly absurd. That kind of decision has got to be made at a high level, even if it's just choosing different budgets without looking closely.
So a CEO must know every detail about every component of every subsystem of every system in every trim level of every car of every brand that the company sells?
If that's really true, we're headed back to the early industrial revolution. Nothing can have more than a few dozen or perhaps hundred parts, and integration of say electronics and mechanical things will be rare, as it'll be the rare CEO who knows enough about both to meet your standard.
Ignorance cannot be an excuse for bad management. If we allow that, then executives can set things up so that they always appear ignorant. E.g., imagine a CEO says, "I don't care how you dispose of that toxic waste, just make sure that it's cheap. And of course it has to be safe [wink, wink]. Just don't bother me with details [wink, wink]." Any employee will know the real message.
The principle that CEOs are responsible for what happens on their watch is major reason cited for their levels of compensation. You don't get it both ways.
If the CEO did things right and made a good work environment but hired a bad exec, and they applied pressure to people to cheat, and this all got done, again, can be traced back to the CEO.
If the CEO did the right thing and hired a seemingly great exec and that exec hired a bad manager, well, perhaps the CEO didn't do such an exceptional job.
Ultimately all organizational failures like this are failures of management, and the CEO is the top manager so it's all on him (or her) when things go sideways.
But just because it's all on them doesn't mean that we can all safely conclude that they definitely had firsthand personal knowledge of the problem and gave their approval, explicit, implicit or otherwise.
The detail that really kills me is that many employees thought that taking notes in meetings related to safety issues was forbidden. There was no official word of that, of course, but lots of people believed that following unofficial, gossip-routed information was the way to succeed in their careers. What lunacy. They should have been allowed to go bankrupt.
Of course, not. Stop trying to change the argument.
He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for. He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why.
I'm not trying to change the argument. I'm taking your statement literally, and showing that it's entirely unworkable in practice. I'm not saying he shouldn't be fired or have to step down, but to presume that he personally, definitely knew is quite the leap. I can think of several scenarios where he didn't know and is entirely innocent which are quite plausible.
I also think that regardless of whether he personally had knowledge of exactly what was being done or not, he still created a work environment which rewarded the shortcut and the cheat over the right thing and needs to go. But that's an entirely different line of reasoning than "he must have known!" as a justification.
> He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for. He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why.
No, not necessarily. You're making an awful lot of assumptions and none of them are even superficially argued, much less backed up by verification. This isn't CO2 where you can draw a pretty clear line correlation between fuel efficiency and CO2 emissions. This is NO2 emissions which are highly variable and depend on a great many factors. So it's entirely possible that for the same CO2 emissions one car might output far more NO2 than another.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-diesel-exhaust-contain-more-n...
I'm very sympathetic to the notion of "if you get to claim credit for the good, then you're also going to be held responsible for the bad" argument, generally I agree with it. This is not an exceptional case. But to argue that because this is a reasonable course of action, that the person in charge of a 500k employee company must have known a particular detail of a particular subsystem? Not reasonable. Not defending the person, the company, the actions, or anything like that but I am attacking your reasoning.
"He would know that VW cars are getting better scores than other cars. These are numbers that CEOs and other managerial positions live for."
Yes. He would know this. I'm not saying he would know or understand the actual technical details (NO2 parts per billion vs other carmakers results).
In fact, I said this, " He would know why. Though he may not understand the technical details of why."
He would know why they are getting better results. "Oh, we tweaked the firmware and now we're in compliance."
There are no superficial assumptions here. CEOs are NOT that detached. And people are going to tell them things. And they are going to ask questions. They aren't fools.
Yes, precisely my point. If he knew that they "tweaked the firmware" well there's a million ways to do that legally and to be in compliance. And there seem to be a few ways you can do it illegally too, and no be in compliance.
The claim he made was "He has said publicly that he is not aware of any wrong-doing on his part." And that's technically true! Hiring someone who punches another employee reflects poorly on you, but that doesn't make the punch your fault. So hiring someone who hired someone who hired someone who told a programmer to come up with a "cheat mode" hardly makes the CEO directly responsible. He is responsible through the chain of command, but not because of direct knowledge.
Finally, please remember that emissions are incredibly complex and it's entirely possible that someday someone will discover a way to get great mileage with low NOx emissions. Maybe it's pulsed injection, maybe it's having more fuel injectors, maybe it's even higher pressures, maybe it's who knows what. So just because you're getting numbers that are better than your competitors doesn't automatically mean that the people in your company must be cheating and that they need to be found out. It's entirely likely that they just did something clever!