I am pretty sure that was not the engineers, but someone higher up the food chain ordering people to do that. I might be wrong, but maybe I missed the obvious "/s" or "/i" here.
Clearly the engineering team didn't know ahead of time that Electrify America would be the end result of dieselgate. Had they known, perhaps they would have been more eager to do the engineering work though! haha
It was just a fun inside joke, since nobody could have assumed the fines would create Electrify America. Personally I'm glad Electrify America exists, though the way it happened was probably not the best path to get here.
EA even has successfully moved on from just being an org forced into existence and are actively trying to take care of customers and produce a good product now that they have some competition.
I mean, the only reason they did it was to be able to comply with the requirements of the test.
But the reality is that every once in a while you have a scandal like this or something like Wirecard, and it happens, because the culture is such that absolutely nobody thinks it possible. That includes officials and regulators whose first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
>because the culture is such that absolutely nobody thinks it possible
Only naive laymen or newcomers to Germany think it's not possible. German business leaders, lawyers and politicians know exactly how much corruption and scamming is going on in the business sector, and it's not a little.
>first instinct will often be to come after the people trying to expose the scandal, as has happened in the case of Wirecard.
That was purely malicious to try to protect Wirecard, not because the regulators couldn't possibly imagine corruption and law breaking exists, that was the story they used as cover for their corruption.
Like you're a regulator and instead of doing the thing you were hired for and look at the evidence The Economist showed you, you instead "use your instincts" to decide not to do your job and not look into Wirecard because you can't imagine something bad can ever happen? Come on! All those regulators should have been fired and tried for corruption and/or accessory to crime.
Germans have a superiority complex over lesser developed countries like Eastern Europe that they use to justify how their corruption is acceptable, and how having much slower and much more expensive internet than developing countries is also acceptable. They're victims of their own arrogance and lack of self criticism.