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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Notably, it seems like most of the automakers were exploiting the tests, and VW got all the attention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

There was very little prosecution of the other automakers, and I'm not aware of any of the brands being withdrawn.

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This is commonly believed and seems to massively let VW off the hook. Almost everyone was overfitting their optimization to the test and thus not delivering real world lower emissions. That's not illegal, just unethical, particularly since they also lobbied to not make the test more realistic. But VW actually detected it was in the test loop and changed the settings. That's a defeat device and completely illegal. There were a few much smaller cases of similar things found in other manufacturers but nothing even close to the scale VW did it.

A bunch of the other automakers had similar 'defeat devices', and they're called out on the Wikipedia page.

Wow. Even Mercedes-Benz were at it:

    Earlier, Feb 2018, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that US authorities
    investigating Mercedes have discovered that its vehicles are equipped with illegal
    software to help them pass United States' stringent emission tests. The claimed
    defeat devices include a Bit 15 mode to switch off emissions control after 16 miles
    of driving (the length of an official U.S. emissions test), and Slipguard which tries
    to directly determine if the car is being tested based on speed and acceleration
    profiles.

I mentioned that. There were others but nothing at the scale of what VW did.

Cummins most recently in the diesel category

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