On Tuesday, Volkswagen’s American branch announced that it would be rebranding to ‘Voltswagen’ in an effort to promote electric cars. The company has now admitted that the announcement was a joke.
The original announcement was released through a fake press release “accidentally” published on Monday and then taken down. At the time, the company refused to comment on the ‘leaked’ release.
A press release published on Tuesday then said that the name change was a “public declaration of the company’s future-forward investment in e-mobility,” and that ‘Voltswagen’ branding would appear on all of their electric vehicles.
It also posted a video on the official Volkswagen Twitter account, whose name is still ‘Voltswagen’.
https://twitter.com/VW/status/1376868756782219266?s=20
Volkswagen US’s parent company in Germany has now confirmed that it was a pre-April Fools Joke.
A number of publications reported seriously on the name change, including the BBC and The Washington Post.
In 2017, they pled guilty and were fined US$2.8 million after selling almost 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US after cheating on mandated emission tests.
Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told The Washington Post that the prank was an unusual choice as “the last thing you would want to do is call attention to your sustainability in relation to your cause given that you were fined billions of dollars.”
“Goofing around about who it is and what it’s trying to do, particularly with anything related to sustainability strikes me as really, really bad taste.”
Volkswagen is making a significant expansion into electric vehicles, committing US$86 million to the push.
Featured Image: Volkwagen
