VW has been caught lying about the capabilities of their cars, then the executives blamed the engineers to cover their asses. If one needs a reason to forget about VW.
VW was the _first_ company selling diesel powered passenger vehicles to be caught lying. Opel/GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Jeep, Renault, Peugeot, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, and Porsche were all later caught somehow skirting diesel emissions testing. Basically all large truck manufacturers did it too.
Clean diesel is a myth, it never was a thing and the only reason anyone thought it was was because the entire auto industry was lying to regulators and customers for decades.
It's not fair to call those manufacturers are criminal like VW. VW (Bosch) cheats the emission test deliberately, but some other manufacturers don't cheat but emission is bad when condition is worse than test environment.
Clean diesel is a myth, it never was a thing and the only reason anyone thought it was was because the entire auto industry was lying to regulators and customers for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal