Volkswagen charged with making cars designed to evade government pollution controls

[stefcio007]

US regulators have charged Volkswagen with manufacturing vehicles designed to evade government pollution controls, and called on the German auto giant to urgently recall and fix nearly 500,000 cars.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-19/vw-charged-over-car-pollution-loophole/6789294

Interesting to see that this was even possible to be done via software I wonder what kind of benefits they achieved by not making them compliant? Since it supposed only complied during emissions testing I think there must have been some kind of performance benefit involved. If so, do this mean that cars that are fixed under the recall will have some kind of reduced performance? Reduced life of parts?
Is it only in the US that compliance was not met?

Such a shame, but at least people didn't directly die from it unlike some other recalls that had to be made by other manufacturers.
The fact that is just emissions compliance and most people will either be uninterested to really find out what that means and/or it's not dramatic enough to develop into a negative image for VW I don't think this will have a huge impact.

Thoughts on this whole debacle?

[stefcio007]

so there's already a thread about this....-----> Volkswagen under investigation over illegal software that masks pollution
admin please delete this thread if possible.