VW is an affordable brand.

And Skoda and SEAT are even more affordable brands, and essentially the same cars.

VW has been caught lying about the capabilities of their cars, then the executives blamed the engineers to cover their asses. If one needs a reason to forget about VW.

VW was the _first_ company selling diesel powered passenger vehicles to be caught lying. Opel/GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Jeep, Renault, Peugeot, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, and Porsche were all later caught somehow skirting diesel emissions testing. Basically all large truck manufacturers did it too.

Clean diesel is a myth, it never was a thing and the only reason anyone thought it was was because the entire auto industry was lying to regulators and customers for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

Of these other scandals, which other companies have their, "executives blamed the engineers"

That is what I was highlighting. Not, "mistakes were made" but, "And they were, points fingers at scapegoat"

It's not fair to call those manufacturers are criminal like VW. VW (Bosch) cheats the emission test deliberately, but some other manufacturers don't cheat but emission is bad when condition is worse than test environment.

Toyota has their fair share of similar scandals. Maybe none at such as scale as WW, but still.

Unless you happen to think that reduced car ownership is good for the world!

Or, even better for the environment , we could kill all of human civilization! /s