If you're speaking on the 1.4l turbo, that was introduced in 2012. Have one in my car and it's a great little engine. Lots of extra room in the engine bay left over though.

Their diesel engines are great. At almost 100k miles on my diesel jetta and no issues whatsoever.

I think the bigger a corporation is, the more shitty things it had to do in order to reach that status.
There are some good companies with a moral code, but they'll never become competitive with the big dogs in our current capitalist system.

From what I've seen, some family owned ones do, as they're run for the long term (rather than by CEOs with an average tenure of less than 2 years and who thus are fine with damaging long term prospects for short term profit boosting as its the latter that dictate the size of tbeir bonuses) so don't want to damage the name of the company and sometimes are even run in a way that reflects the owner's morals and principles.

Market listed companies or even private ones with lots of "investors" as owners (such as the bigger startups) almost never have any morality or, in the case of the latter, reflect the typical morality of the kind of people who are good at getting investors, which tends to be the in the area from the "flexible with the truth" salesman all the way to outright fraudster.

Investment nowadays is pretty short term, amoral and fickle, and this ends up indirectly leading to overwhelmingly certain kinds of personalities ending up leading companies and certain management styles being used, both high on the more sociopath end of the spectrum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

It's common knowledge? It's literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means "the people's car" and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

Founded by the German Labour Front, the Nazi party’s national labour organization.

In 1934, with many of the above projects still in development or early stages of production, Adolf Hitler became involved, ordering the production of a basic vehicle capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph). He wanted a car every German family would be able to afford.

It soon became apparent that private industry could not turn out a car for only 990 ℛ︁ℳ︁. Thus, Hitler chose to sponsor an all-new, state-owned factory using Ferdinand Porsche's design (with some of Hitler's design suggestions, including an air-cooled engine so nothing could freeze).

The beetle having a rear mounted air cooled engine was Hitler’s design.