The 10-second clip for the German car company’s new Volkswagen Golf model features a giant, white hand poking and prodding a Black man, much like he’s a marionette.
But the company backpedaled on Thursday when Volkswagen board member Juergen Stackmann and Volkswagen’s head of diversity management, Elke Heitmueller, said they were “horrified” by the ad in a joint Twitter statement translated into English by The Washington Post.
On top of the notoriety Volkswagen earned for its emissions cheating scandal, the company is responsible for several ads with controversial messaging.
In 2013, the company released a Super Bowl ad in which a white man spoke with a Jamaican accent and encouraged people to be more relaxed.
In 2017, it ran an ad for Audi (which the company also owns) that compared women to cars.