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Originally Posted by FenwickHockey65
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Thats not the conclusion I would draw from those statements. Lutz talked about this a couple weeks ago on Autoline After Hours, using almost the exact same story. As he told it, he was basically telling the engineers that VW could figure out how to do this ... why can't they? And the engineers couldn't really come up with an answer. But they were working under the assumption that VW
had cracked the code, that there was some little trick that the Germans knew that GM (and everyone else) didn't. Such things probably happen from time to time.
If there was any suspicion of cheating, it would have been on an individual level not a corporate level. But nothing that I've heard from Lutz indicates that he himself thought they were cheating -and he isn't exactly known for holding back when asked for his opinion.
Side note: in that same After Hours episode, he talked about the dictatorial leadership style of Ferdinand Piech (former VW CEO). How he had to get everything he wanted, or you'd get fired. In that kind of environment if you're presented with a technical impossibility (such as 'produce powerful, efficient, clean diesels without using DEF') with no option for failure, the only way forward is to cheat.