Despite an otherwise purportedly very green profile, Volkswagen in Denmark has chosen to fly its employees to Germany and back again in less than 24 hours. The boss himself says so.
– We are committed to acting responsibly and promoting climate-friendly behavior.
This is what Semler Mobility, which imports the brands from the Volkswagen Group in Denmark, writes on its website.
But judging from the management's posts on LinkedIn, it is seriously struggling to meet its otherwise climate-friendly goals.
On the social media LinkedIn, the head of Semler Mobility, Claus Bjerring Christiansen, shares that he, along with a number of his colleagues, flew all the way to a conference in Düsseldorf only to be back home 24 hours later.
– Together with a lot of happy and committed Semler Mobility colleagues (sic.), I have just returned home from 24 intense hours of Volkswagen Brand Experience in Düsseldorf, writes Claus Bjerring Christiansen.
In one of the pictures that Bjerring Christiansen has attached to the post, it is clearly seen that the Danish delegation has flown to Düsseldorf and back again.
If the Danish Volkswagen people flew from Copenhagen, it would have taken a total of 2 hours and 40 minutes in a plane to get there and back.
The trip has certainly saved the Danish VW people a 7 hour and 45 minute car trip. But it has also cost 200 kilos of CO2 per passenger, according to calculations from Flightfree.com.
However, the Danish VW top is not the only one at Volkswagen who likes to deal with the large CO2 accounts.
Because even though the management in Wolfsburg could easily have been short on electric cars for a conference in Stockholm, they still chose to spend millions of euros to accommodate the top executives in an art museum for just two days. Read more about it here .
The news about the very expensive trip to Sweden's capital came at the same time that Volkswagen itself announced that it was parting ways with 35,000 employees and as many as 3 factories in Germany due to cutbacks.
Factory closures in Germany have never been something VW has been willing to do. Conversely, the group's sister brand, Audi, has just closed its only car factory in Belgium.
A maneuver that cost 3,000 people their jobs. This week Audi announced that another 7,500 employees will be laid off.
This time it is primarily engineers and office workers who are going to be laid off. But Porsche and Škoda are also making cuts. The worst situation is at Czech Škoda, which is going to get rid of a total of 8,000 people.
Boosted is trying to get Volkswagen in Denmark to answer how the trip to Germany looks in relation to the company's own climate policy.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/claus-bjerring-christiansen-9a4a30b_bex-activity-7306933919382171648-YmFY?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABf9LQcBvpl_bQTcCcUmsfOmWc0oOhMzZxY
