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An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal - The New Yorker

Saw this on Reddit and wanted to share here...pretty good read that raises some valid thoughts. Especially the "normalization of deviance" phenomenon:

...[The scandal] may well have begun with a few lines of engine-tuning software. Perhaps it started with tweaks that optimized some aspect of diesel performance and then evolved over time: detect this, change that, optimize something else. At every step, the software changes might have seemed to be a slight “improvement” on what came before, but at no one step would it necessarily have felt like a vast, emissions-fixing conspiracy by Volkswagen engineers, or been identified by Volkswagen executives. Instead, it would have slowly and insidiously led to the development of the defeat device and its inclusion in cars that were sold to consumers.

What are your thoughts?