It is outrageous to suggest that the blame lies with a handful of people and not a whole division of the company. I don't work in the automotive industry, but

It is outrageous to suggest that the blame lies with a handful of people and not a whole division of the company. I don't work in the automotive industry, but I do work as a design engineer in the semiconductor industry and for a mature product in a highly competitive industry, I can guarantee that the external test wasn't the only test that these cars were put though. When we release a chip external reviewers will run it thorough a handful of benchmarks, but we run far more tests internally because when you are building complex systems, not everything that you plan for happens, and you need an extreme level of detail to be able to understand and fix performance problems. Literally hundreds of engineers will participate in performing these measurements, and most of them, along with the whole management tree up to the CEO (especially for an important consumer facing product), will participate in interpreting them. Not doing this means getting left in the dust by your competitors. There is no way that only a small number of people knew about this. Two is laughable, people here with software engineering backgrounds should be highly skeptical that any piece of software in a product with as many users as a car was only examined by two people. The only explanation is that a large number of engineers and managers knew about this and did nothing.