There used to be some certainties in life. We could breakfast on a healthy cereal brand and listen to familiar and reliable voices talking politics on the radio before easing into our late-model German hot hatch and setting off to that nice safe job at the bank.

How times change. That healthy cereal turns out to be laden with sugar. Now Volkswagen faces disgrace, exposure and eye-boggling fines for what appears to be a damning indictment of corporate chicanery.

The Volkswagen scandal threatens to undermine that company’s standing as one of the world’s great motor manufacturers and its implications are spreading across every major auto market.

VW’s diesel engines were programmed to detect when an emissions test was beginning, and to respond by changing their performances accordingly to produce better results. The so-called “defeat device” – fitted to 482,000 VW and Audi cars in the United States – hid the fact that nitrogen oxide pollutants of up to 40 times more than the legal limit were being emitted into the atmosphere.

Worse, the German corporate giant has confirmed that about 11 million cars were fitted with the device worldwide. The situation in the US, which has some of the strictest emission laws in the world, emerged soon after a major marketing campaign during which VW claimed to Americans that their cars were low-emission vehicles.

The cars have been recalled at an estimated cost of £4.7 billion and the firm faces maximum fines of more than £11bn. That is only the US. We do not yet know the implications for the company in Europe or Asia.

This begs the question: If a corporate leader like VW has the ingenuity to develop a “defeat device”, might it have been better invested in finding a legitimate way to reduce emissions? Moreover, why the recall? Is it to fix the problem, and if so does that mean the company knew how to do so all along?

The public can put up with the occasional scandal. Personal wrong-doing in the board-room, perhaps some indiscretion of even a simple fraud. But it hates to be deliberately misled, taken for a ride, especially by a brand it has historically trusted. This makes us upset and angry; sometimes we take it personally. Ask anyone still left working in a high street branch of a Scottish bank, or perhaps a Labour canvasser knocking doors in Dundee what that feels like.

Last Friday I watched the Dundee Rep re-interpret that remarkable socialist classic The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil before a rapt sell-out audience. When I studied that play at school, it was a trenchant analysis of capitalist exploitation from the Highland clearances to the arrival of North Sea oil. The conclusion was simple: profiteering bad, “the people” good.

There was no doubt then that “the people” found representation in the Labour movement. At Dundee Rep in 2015, that trust had transferred to the cheering Yes lobby, with its anniversary celebrations and its “Don’t blame me, I voted Yes” sweatshirts. In their eyes Labour has joined the exploitative multinationals of the 1970s, the banks, and now VW in a lengthening list of organisations that breached trust and in whom faith had been lost.

What can we say about the banks that hasn’t been said? Until now, every generation grew up trusting their bank manager as they might a local doctor or religious leader. Today, branch staff and the call centre infantry bear the brunt of public fuming at the transgressions of much more senior figures who sanctioned sharp practice and often got away with it.

Certain banks’ mis-selling has actually been theft and fraud. The euphemism hides nothing. People were deliberately mis-led. Now, if they own a diesel VW car, they might feel it is happening all over again.

How does the corporate world react? In the bunker somewhere, strategists and special advisers will be working on a new plan to handle awkward questions about “defeat devices”, as they grapple with the task of constructing some kind of reputational recovery beyond the legal suits and the billions to be wasted on fines that might have been better spent on really worthwhile technology that made cars run more safely.

Next door in marketing, they might even be “blue-skying” how to sell the idea – over time – that the next generation of cars to be designed by a certain chastened but healthier German manufacturer might be safer, better, faster than anything that went before.

That sort of approach used to work well when markets, parties and businesses were trusted. Brands could be re-positioned successfully. Today, corporations, governments and politicians face a public that is slow to forgive, and forgets nothing.