How Volkswagen's love affair with diesel led to scandal

Dieselgate just keeps on getting dirtier.

A little more than a week after the news first broke that Volkswagen had cheated on emissions testing in some of its diesel vehicles for years, the EPA announced it would toughen those tests for future vehicles — for all automakers. The CEO has resigned, and an official recall is widely expected. Other automakers are being implicated as well.

What elevates the VW scandal above many of the other car recalls and problems of the past few years is how deliberate it was. Whether or not the CEO actually knew, VW cheated on its emissions tests to deceive regulators in a systemic, planned way, and even built "defeat devices" specifically tasked with doing so. Why would people at a company do such a thing, and why would they think they could get away with it indefinitely? Read more...