I don't know much about the particular issue that the VW computers have, other than what the news articles are saying, but... based on what I know about:
- Cars
- Computer software
- Byzantine government regulations
- Reading between the lines in news articles...

I think that this VW thing is probably getting blown way out of proportion by the news. They seem to be singling out VW as some evil company who deliberately falsified emissions on the cars. I'm not sure it's that clear-cut. From what I could gather from the news articles, VW's chairman stepped up, apologized, and said they will work to fix it, which I think is good. But I'm not sure he even needed to go that far.

First of all, the news article I read made reference to other EPA test failures on other diesel vehicles, including commercial trucks. I'm assuming that the article meant commercial trucks from a variety of companies. I think that if there's a true environmental issue here, then that's likely where the largest part of the problem lies in terms of gross tonnage of greenhouse gases. My guess is that VW's passenger cars would be a relatively minor issue in comparison.

And if other companies had similar issues, if that's true, then VW need not be singled out. The news articles which single out VW are being disingenuous in that case. Maybe VW was just doing what everyone else in the auto industry is doing. Was what they did really that much worse than what other companies did?

Then there's the issues of the complexities of computer software, interacting with the complexities of government regulations, interacting with the complexities of diesel engine operation. I'm not entirely convinced that the engine management software was deliberately coded in a nefarious way. There's a lot of places for problems to crop up in that set of complex interactions. Even if VW's chairman stepped up and took the blame, I'm still not sure what went on behind the scenes. Maybe the coders were trying to follow regulations and misunderstood, or there was some kind of a bug, or there was a problem that was missed in quality assurance. Or, maybe, diesel engines emissions are difficult to control no matter how you slice it, and occasional problems like this are inevitable. The news articles seemed to imply that there was deliberate fraud going on without actually citing any solid evidence that this was done on purpose.

It's still a bad problem, and still needs to be fixed, no argument there. Global warming is a scary and serious problem, and things like this are among the reasons why.

I'm just a little skeptical about the news organizations regarding this particular story. I think they were excited about being able to point the global warming finger somewhere and ran with it a little too hard.