This is how the arms race begins. Soon the manufacturers will know how much the equipment weighs, and if the car's total weight is within tolerance for that plus a test driver, the mechanisms activate.

Or whatever - the point isn't the methods, it's the pattern of one-upsmanship.

True, but there shouldn't be an arms race to begin with - one of the parties has men with guns, the other has not. VW should be sued to the ground for fucking with society like that. They should be turned into an example of what happens when you try to pull off highly damaging criminal stunts like that.

Problem is that you don't get the people responsible if you do this. Punishing corporations only work if you do it in real time as the crimes are committed so that it has consequences for the individuals responsible.

Taking VW to court now, while the cars with the software mods in question are currently in the wild, is as Real Time as it gets.

Indeed. Also, it may sound brutal but even if all the responsible evaded the hard punishment that came upon the company, the next time someone would think about pulling such a stunt off, he'd be opposed by the rest. You just need to make the consequences hard enough to bubble up the ladder and ruin the day for someone at the top.

The buck stops with the shareholders.