Please don't rewrite titles when the original is neither misleading nor linkbait. This is a rule here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The submitted title was "Volkswagen seriously made a PowerPoint deck on how to cheat emissions tests". That's more linkbait, which is driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

It might be a good idea to link to or explain submission title rules on the submit page as most new submitters probably won't go looking for the Guidelines page. Many new users could be coming from forums or sites where editorializing headlines it the norm and/or expected.

Got it, thanks for correcting it.

Yeah, we knew as soon as they said it.

Any product feature like that would most likely need to be known to a number of teams such as marketing, engineering, production, documentation, compliance, supply chain, QA, tooling, support, or whatever they call those inside VW. So many teams would be coordinated by a pretty high level exec.

source: rogue engineer

It's an interesting case study in regulations not being complied with. I guess the lawmakers expected the car companies to take the financial and performance hit to meet the emissions standard. Instead the car companies cheated.

I imagine governments will be more careful in checking manufacturers are actually meeting standards after this.

Or maybe they'll realize it's not too effective to tell companies how to make their products.

Right, because the air in Los Angeles is barely breathable, just as it was in the 70s. Wait, I got that wrong; the air in L. A. isn't too bad these days. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, the effectiveness of regulations. On that topic, now I'm not saying there's direct cause-and-effect here, but...

Cleaner air in LA is primarily due to two technological breakthroughs: positive crankcase ventilation, and catalytic converters. That's the proper way to do regulations: once a cleaner tech is invented, make it mandatory. The other way around, mandating a steady decrease de-coupled from technological advances, is more likely to lead to cheating.

But how do you direct the industry to invent cleaner tech without the pressure of emission regulation?

A concrete solution which would have avoided "Dieselgate" is if the EPA had made urea NOx removal tech mandatory on all diesel vehicles. Saying "cars in the future must be X% cleaner" is needed, but it's not a complete solution.

Plus, more often than not, the technology to make cars cleaner is available, but expensive and so manufacturers don't use it.

Water-methanol injection, for instance, is well proven tech (since WW2), but not adopted at large scale because it requires changes to gas pump infrastructure etc. The only way to overcome a chicken-and-egg problem like that is governments making it mandatory.

Are you implying that we should abolish pollution restrictions on car manufacturers?

Free market is so well-known for handling negative externalities well...

Not necessarily, no.

Of course it was.

The day it was announced the CEO stepped down, said he knew of it, and assumed responsibility.

I’m not sure where the "rogue engineers" myth comes from, but VW Germany said on day one that it was top-level managers involved in it.

The '"rogue engineers" myth' comes from the CEO of VW USA. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/an-engineering-th...

Edit: The rest of your comment is false. The day the news came out, Winterkorn posted a video acknowledging the problem but not mentioning resignation -- he did not resign that day. And when he did resign, he explicitly said that he was not aware of any wrongdoing on his part. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/international/vol...

That's an interesting translation. He said he took the responsibility, but was unaware of wrongdoing when he resigned (I read the original announcement).

So, no, my comment isn't false — but yours isn't either.