[earthboundkid]

The worst part of English orthography is adopting the writing conventions of literally every other language in the world and then expecting people to pronounce the words "correctly." If you want English speakers to pronounce something a certain way, it should be written use our spelling system. There's no point in shaming people for not knowing literally every language. But that's basically the system we have now.

[jablan]

Which spelling system? English is notorious for not having any spelling consistency.

[Udik]

That "correctly" needs an extra pair of scare quotes. The spelling bee competition is, essentially, the "guess the mispronounced foreign word" competition. Pejerrey? "Pay-ray". Lol.

[atleta]

This is an interesting observation. As a non-native speaker I was surprised by how many German expressions are used in English (with the correct German spelling). Even when there is a perfect (or near perfect) English equivalent.

However, this is pretty different as VW is a brand name so you don't have much liberty in how you write it.

[earthboundkid]

Toyota was toyoda in Japanese, but they changed the spelling to look better in English. It can be done. And why not? They change the names of cars all the time. Why not the brands too?

[atleta]

Because brands have a value. And probably VW doesn't really care that much if some people call them wolkswagen instead of folkswagen (even if they could pronounce the latter).

Also, I don't think FW would look better than VW ;). And well, Toyota didn't change their name to look better in English (or rather, written with the Latin alphabet). At least not according to wikipedia. Quite the contrary, it was about how it was written in Japanse:

"Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichirō Toyoda.

[...]

In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Of 27,000 entries, the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. However, Rizaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a lucky number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off the diacritic at the end), and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonants are considered to have a "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to voiceless consonants, which are "clear").

Since toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also prevented the company from being associated with old-fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the Toyota Motor Company.[31][32][33]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#1920s%E2%80%931930s

[Bud]

Except that English does not have a "spelling system". At all. Even a passing glance at English would reveal that.