[malandrew]

With the following question, I'm not absolving VW from criticism. With that in mind:

Why are we not holding those doing the measurement accountable as well?

If you produce a test that can be gamed and your job is to test things to meet consumer expectations, you've failed at your job.

After all is said and done, what is a better outcome: a) VW is punished for gaming the test b) the test is significantly harder to game

With (a), we have only one less manufacturer gaming the tests, VW. With (b) we have tests that none of the manufacturers can game any longer or at least will take time to game. The testers should be expected to always be two steps ahead.

This is not unlike whitehat/blackhat security engineering. We should pay bug bounties to teams that successfully exploit the tests and we should be actively running red team drills.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team