Just because VW might have more motive to do this doesn&#x27;t automatically mean that they&#x27;re lying when they say it was the fault of individual engineers. Guilt is not determined by &quot;who has the most motive&quot;, it&#x27;s determined by who actually <i>did</i> it.<p>Now it may very well be true that VW is lying and it was a corporate decision. But it&#x27;s not completely implausible that this really was the decision of a few individual employees.<p>Other commenters here are expressing surprise that engineers could &quot;slip through arbitrary code&quot; to do this. But isn&#x27;t that kind of the job of software engineers, to write code to do things? I would hope they have code review going on at VW, but code review doesn&#x27;t always catch everything, or maybe several engineers who were working together would review each other&#x27;s code.