For the company, these kinds of systemic failures are unquestionably bad.
For the specific employees making each decision, this might have been the utility-maximizing choice. All they need to do is to keep the wheels rolling (sorry) and profit coming in until they are out.
No amount of punishing the company can fix this. In order to fix the problem, prosecutors need to go after the individuals who made the calls.
As an aside: A good number of people in Europe will apparently prematurely die as a result of their actions, so if nothing else, it will be incredibly difficult for many of these guilty employees to justify their actions even to themselves.
Of course, there's a simpler answer: because they think it will be profitable. The aggressive settlements described in the article might even have been a part of the original calculations in just how much money could be made.
That seems like an unwarranted assumption rooted in confirmation bias. It seems like everyone gets caught... because everyone we know about gets caught. There could be legions of cases like this that we never find out about.
I'd say it's rooted in statistics:
1. Take this tire. If you know that there's a high chance it will blow up, then ... the more you sell, the more tires blow up in the wild; the more tires that blow up, the more injured & dead. The more injured & dead - the more likely you are to get caught. The end-to-end equation is "the more tires you sell, the worse your chances to get away with it".
2. Dieselgate: it's different, in that nothing "blows up". But still, the more cars you put on the road, the higher the chance one owner/mechanic will notice it. Maybe your "chance of detection" doesn't increase dramatically with the success of the product (though it definitely does increase), but the impact of it being detected increases linearly with the number of cars sold! This is still a very bad equation, since VW had zero deniability - once the cheat was detected in one car, it could be easily reproduced in all.
It just doesn't seem to work out, from a risk-benefit perspective. Maybe only if you're looking very short term?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/european...
VW was surprised by the American response, since they simply did not expect the law to be enforced (they were apparently unaware of a similar diesel scandal that occurred with US truck manufacturers in the 90’s).
Source: Faster, Higher, Farther: The Inside Story of the Volkswagen Scandal Book by Jack Ewing
In this case the outcome was pretty straightforward. Tires were literally coming apart at the seams. I'd wager that oftentimes product failures are less obvious. Maybe a certain tire exhibits unexpected sliding on certain types of pothole filler. We probably identify 0% of product failures that don't follow a human recognizable pattern.
Some of these accounts probably unfold according to a "Breaking Bad" progression. Skylar never would have gotten involved in criminal activity except that her husband was already knee deep in it when she found out. A great deal of her rationale was keeping someone else from getting in trouble.
For example if 1,000,000 tires with a %1 failure rate were sold and each claim costs 1mm, the break-even on litigating to seal evidence would be 1bn.
So the product is already out there, it will be discontinued eventually anyway, and aggressive litigation in a small number of cases is cheaper then painting a bullseye on your back with a recall. Makes sense to me.