I think that's a fair point, and I completely agree that the emissions scandals were horribly handled by the EU. For the record though, Germany actually did an arguably better job than the EU commision (actually doing investigations into the fraud and raiding several car companies), while the EU appears to have done very little.

But neither have not done as well as Switzerland (banning VW diesel cars entirely), South Korea (criminal case against VW executives), Netherlands (class action and investigating the reacquisition of the subsidies paid to VW previously), Australia (forced recalls and class action lawsuits), or America (as you've already mentioned).

I don't know whether the car industry is the best example of "EU interventionism" done right, given how central the car industry is to Europe's enconomy (which is a whole different issue). I'm not sure whether they would've treated non-EU companies differently.