A Critical Analysis of Sustainability Reporting In the Automotive Industry
- Abstract:
The VW emissions scandal uncovered significant deficiencies in the sustainability
performance of numerous automotive producers. This raised the question,
whether sustainability reporting still reflects the real-life sustainability performance
in the automotive industry. If sustainability reporting was transparent and honest,
the tone of the reports should have been a more critical one in recent years. To
test this, a quantitative and a qualitative study were conducted. While in the
quantitative study, it was analyzed in which way automotive producers present
themselves in their sustainability reports, the qualitative study focused on their
real-life sustainability deficiencies. The results suggest that on an industry level,
sustainability reporting widely fails as an indicator of real-life sustainability. All
companies presented their sustainability actions in a highly positive way, although
more than two thirds of them were involved in sustainability scandals. However,
this result cannot be exactly confirmed on a company level. While the average
relationships are weak, they still rather suggest that those companies which
present themselves in the most positive way tend to perform the best and vice
versa. Since this only reflects the relative differences in the companies’ selfpresentation,
it hardly contradicts the main finding of the study: Sustainability
Reporting as it is used in today’s automotive industry rather serves embellishment
than transparency purposes.