There's no defense for what they did. I mean it's so silly it's the sort of thing you expect to be part of the evil guy's plans to destroy the world in a Bond film... not something that a stupid corporation actually does.
"We consider this law illegitimate and do not consent to be bound by it."
You may not LIKE that defense, but it's a defense - pretty much the canonical anarchocapitalist one.
"Your vehicles are no longer allowed to be sold in the US"
Gaming tests and parameters doesn't seem too far fetched to me. In high school one class allowed for one 3x5" notecard to be brought to the final exam, and it could have notes written on it. Following the letter but not the spirit of the rule, I used a razor blade to gently split the notecard and was able to peel it open for about 70% more writing space. Though a technicality, I did manage to use my device with approval in that case.
If you had "Followed the letter but not the spirit of a rule" and wound up endangering people's health, do you honestly think there would be no repercussions other than a "haha, clever you! You can get away with it on a technicality this once" ?
Being good stewards of the Eart is important, and as long as there are regulations and rules, there will be different attitudes to contend with. I consider air quality to be valuable, I genuinely do. I also think the entire annual production of all VW automobiles globally does less air quality "damage" than one season of wildfires in the western United States. Or a vocanic eruption.
"empirically show" is a stupefyingly high standard for a comments thread.
I assume that you are familiar with the scale of the problem for starter?
e.g. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut... http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/study-air-pol... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26973783
It's a misdirection on your part anyway, comparing a knowingly harmful and deceptive like this to Some industrial accident is not valid: People die in accidents; this does stop murder being a thing.
Which would be an astonishing statement to actually make, considering that air pollution kills people. It's basically singing the praises of corporate manslaughter.
Even more so, given that anarchocapitalism isn't really popular in Germany any more.
I fail to see how a big corp like this could not see the impact. Why take such a stupid risk?
Too many people work on little parts of it, nobody sees the big picture. Everybody applies the 'spec' blindly. At the end you get something that becomes very good at explotiing loopholes by 'itself'. It's a side effect.
I mean, your sunday-afternoon genetic algorithm would do the same kind of things :)
That is, of course, easier said than done. I have had to deal with my share of unrealistic flow-downs and unsympathetic systems engineers. In this particular case at VW the most likely root cause was a team that had a flow-down they couldn't meet honestly and couldn't change, so they cheated their way around it.
Humans are notoriously bad at risk judgement for this kind of thing. Basically the adult equivalent of "If I can't see you, you can't see me"
But this cheating seems surprisingly coordinated.
The repair bills on my BMW are in contradiction to "delivering quality". The car instead appears to have been optimized for "delivering ongoing repair business" to the local dealership.
The modern German self-image is a lie.
Huh? The cartels are using primarily AR and AK pattern rifles smuggled through the US or stolen from the Mexican government.
Second, the weapons in question were sold to local Mexican governments.[2] The investigation appears to stem from the German government not trusting all elements of the Mexican government to use the weapons responsibly.
It was an attempt to dump thousands of rifles the German Army didn't want any more. Some subset of the rifles got in the hands of dirty Mexican cops and were either used by said cops in support of the cartels or stolen on behalf of them. The impact is minimal and HK is not supplying the drug cartels.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/german-arms-maker-heckler-koch-illegall...
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/03/us-mexico-germany-...