I'm not sure that was the best example for your point, the few untrustworthy people in Volkswagen did cause cars to not work as advertised. That's an example for not trusting any of their products anymore.
Look, it wasn't everyone in the company. Just the CEO, a team of product designers, some developers, the entire management chain between the coder and the CEO, and maybe some people in Q&A.
That's no reason to paint the entire company with a broad brush.
Sure, I brought that up for a reason. Despite some underhanded maneuvering and cheating, the emissions-compromised cars still passed independent safety tests and I haven't heard of anyone being killed by them.
They won't be killed by the cars physically running them over or otherwise going out of control, true, but that's because the untrustworthy people chose to be untrustworthy in emissions standards and not in handling or self-driving algorithms or anything. You can't rely on them always making that choice, because they're untrustworthy.
> The researchers [examining the health impact from the 2.6 million affected cars sold in Germany] estimate that 1,200 people in Europe will die early, each losing as much as a decade of their life [edited for brevity]
I have no doubt that the extra pollution is doing health damage. I strongly want more air pollution regulation. I don't trust Volkswagen, and I had one of the super-polluter TDIs, and sold it back to VW.
But this claim of 1,200 premature deaths by up to a decade seems goofy. If VW's 2.6M cars in Germany alone were taking a decade off anyone's life, it seems like we'd all be dead already. The world has over a billion polluting motor vehicles, and we're not even talking about airplanes, fires, factories, natural sources of NOx, or energy production. Car emissions are a minority of the total.
For sure, lots of people are getting sick from pollution in Europe and globally, but I wish the authors had stuck with person-years of life rather than try to state it as a specific number of people affected. Whatever actually happens, assuming it was even possible to pinpoint VW, which it's not, the probability that number of people affected in Europe is near 1,200 is almost zero. So, I guess at least consider calling it what it is: someone's estimate.
Sure, they passed a safety test and didn't run anybody over because the emissions monitoring system doesn't affect the handling of the car
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that the same kind of wilful dishonesty around monitoring cars' ability to choose the appropriate speed, direction or reaction in certain road situations wouldn't result in fatal accidents?
I'm not sure that was the best example for your point, the few untrustworthy people in Volkswagen did cause cars to not work as advertised. That's an example for not trusting any of their products anymore.