None of this is really new, the mostly German car lobby has resisted European emissions testing on testing strict real-world usage, as opposed to testing on a r

None of this is really new, the mostly German car lobby has resisted European emissions testing on testing strict real-world usage, as opposed to testing on a roller. Anyone who spent 10 minutes looking into this in the past years could've told you that, and it wasn't some big secret. A lot of it was stuff everyone was doing, like fitting certain tires and inflating them such that the rolling resistance is reduced. At the end of the day, there are limits to those gains and everyone does it, so in can't set you apart from the competition and once the basic manipulations are exhausted and the emissions goalposts are moved you can't make gains anymore without actually improving the car. Further most of these are for CO2 emissions / fuel efficiency, which is different from the VW fraud which was about NOx emissions. The difference with the VW case is that VW essentially defrauded the test by building a device that measured various factors to establish whether it was being driven normally or whether it was being tested. In the former case it'd shut down (allowing 35x the legal limit of NOx emissions into the air while driving), while in the latter case it'd dampen the emissions (at the cost of engine performance, which is why they shut it off during regular driving). That's a different level of fraud, one that has very few bounds and can change results by much more than an order of magnitude, and is hugely controversial because it makes every test meaningless in the short, medium and long term and isn't practiced by everyone, and so different from manipulating tests by e.g. inflating tires which can still produce meaningful test, benchmarks and comparisons, when you start building 'defeat devices' all of that goes out the window completely.