This also comes on the heels of DoJ's memo saying that they were going to criminally prosecute individuals within the next corporate rule breaker. I don't know if this was an open investigation prior to that memo, but it seems like a really good test case, because unlike Toyota's and GM's recent suits, which were bad but still sins of omission, this is definitely 100% a sin of commission, and really fuckin' depraved on at that. I can't imagine that this doesn't go all to the way to a c-suite of some sort. You can't, nor would you even try to, pull something like this if your bonus doesn't depend on it directly. It also is a really good reminder of Occam's razor. No one else in the industry could ever figure out how VW got those power numbers with those emission numbers at that price. It looked like magic. It's too obvious to think fraud and has too much hubris. But in the end, it always remained the most likely explanation and seems obvious now in retrospect.