I know that feeling, but please reconsider. I think you are wildly underestimating people's surprising ability to do the wrong thing without even fully noticin

I know that feeling, but please reconsider. I think you are wildly underestimating people's surprising ability to do the wrong thing without even fully noticing. Defeat device engineer? Emission levels are obviously O(n), with n being fuel consumption and the small but important twist that in the case of NOx and friends, O is far from constant but highly variable depending on many outside factors. But when the root purpose of the defeat device is to allow more aggressive mileage/CO2 optimizations (at the cost of a much higher big-O) it would be easy enough to conveniently forget all about O even while actively making it a lot more variable than it is naturally. Yay, higher mileage, lower n, planet saved, it's good to be us. It's incredibly stupid, but according to hanlon's razor, that is how most evildoing gets done. Still, I fully agree with your conclusion that the loss of trust (and the resulting lower threshold for future evildoings) is even worse than all the NOx/NSA/lost taxes.