This is far beyond ethical concerns and distinctly into fraud territory. They planned to generate false data to convince customers to buy their products, and to get governments to approve their shit.<p>And of course, when they get caught, they throw their subordinates under the bus:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;vw_boss_engineers_blame&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;vw_boss_engineers_bl...</a><p>&gt; &quot;This was not a corporate decision from my point of view,&quot; Horn said while under oath.
&gt; &quot;To my knowledge this was a couple of software engineers.&quot;<p>Now we find out:<p>1) It was management that came up with the idea to commit this fraud, and they hired government consultants to find out exactly how the testing happened, and used them in a management-directed project to figure out exactly how to commit this fraud.<p>2) Martin Winterkorn, the top of VW management, REPEATEDLY prevented project proposals by engineers to fix this issue (reason: &quot;More effective emissions equipment would have made Volkswagen vehicles hundreds of dollars more expensive&quot;)<p>3) Top management actively studied how much they&#x27;d be punished for this (&quot;An American law firm hired by Volkswagen to examine regulatory issues, Kirkland &amp; Ellis, told the carmaker in an August 2015 memo that the previous record penalty was $100 million&quot;)<p>4) Senior management asked engineers to study the chances of getting caught (&quot;Court documents filed by Volkswagen indicate that the technicians thought the chances of being caught cheating were slim when the deception began in 2006&quot;)<p>5) Management refused to even stop cheating as a result of getting found out, when the courts weren&#x27;t involved (&quot;Signs of irregularities in Volkswagen cars were discovered in 2014 by a nonprofit group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, based on testing performed at West Virginia University&quot;)<p>At what point do we start talking personal responsibility for these assholes ? This is fraud, plain and simple ... they planned to lie to the government, and to the people buying their products. Then they executed on their plan to commit fraud, involving large amounts of subordinates, then they were discovered and attempted to throw others under the bus.<p>By contrast if you can&#x27;t be convicted for committing fraud on your customers, and lying to the government to get approval, what&#x27;s to stop companies from selling Chinese-style &quot;100G&quot; flashdrives ? What&#x27;s to prevent companies from putting FDA approved stickers on different medicines than the ones that were approved ?