Thats unbelievable. So they purposefully fucked with the car design to sell some juice? Beancounters beware. I wonder who it was that pitched such an unconscionable asinine idea. It seems like there were some missing NO men as well.
If I remember well, the main offenders were German OEMs that colluded with VW on that. other European OEMs mainly toyed around with other stuff and edge cases, some activities were later found to be illegal. Most so were able to fix it by "just" burning more Adblue and getting rid of temp windows and such things.
VW was the only one I know that was forced to tweak engine performance. IMHO the goal was optimize weight and cost, and engine design. Only VW seemed to have gone far enough to design engines that were technically barely, if at all, able to comply with emission requirements. So they resorted to cheating. Once that worked, it escalated to the point 11 million cars were affected. Kind a stupid if you ask me.
