If the government did nothing at all in the matter, I believe car companies wouldn&#x27;t care less about emissions (though perhaps it would result in higher CO2 emissions but lower NOx emissions and perhaps that would have been a net benefit to society - but I&#x27;m not sure about that, so I wouldn&#x27;t make an argument hinging on this being true.) Personally I would not advocate stripping the government of the power to regulate emissions (though I&#x27;m not at all sure how to get them to do their job properly), on the theory that with all the unintended consequences of regulation including higher NOx emissions, it&#x27;s still better than nothing. But I have a feeling that jailing regulators is a promising approach to improving future regulators&#x27; performance, and this approach seems underrepresented in public discourse, perhaps because most people prefer to either abolish regulation altogether or to always blame the regulated industry. The main reason I mentioned stripping regulators of their power is that this is the logical conclusion of the assumption that we should expect competent, honest regulators to fail to detect fraud at such a huge scale.