Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game
My personal suspicion goes way beyond VW in this case. Look at it this way. If someone in your domain of expertise would put out a feat, that according to your experience is just so far beyond the state of the art that it seems to realy violate the rules of what you think possible, and you work in a highly competitive field, then your competitive intelligence will be all over it. Every diesel engine R&D center at any auto maker would have inspected, measured, tested and dismantled these engines to the very last detail. And they would all have discovered the simple truth they suspected all along (benchmark cheating through test cycle detection and software manipulation is nothing new in the industry. Automakers have been caught en fined for this at least since 1998). Yet, none of these competitors spoke up about it. Why?