The premise of the original article is wrong. The whole point is, that the emission tests are meant to be cheated. You pass the test, no matter how, and the car is ok to be sold. The rules are written in a way that you follow them to the letter and everything is ok. It doesn't matter that you don't follow the rules how the voter thinks the rules are meant.
And volkswagen did a professional mistake in failing to adhere the rules to the letter. That's all.
All car manufacturers are "cheating" here. They are just lucky that they managed to adhere to the rules to the letter. Maybe we'll find others failing too in the next weeks.

This is all bad and immoral, but that's the way it is at the moment.

The rules are a result of political actionism. The politicians look good for in fact doing nothing. Additionally there is corruption that the local car manufacturer gets things done cheaply while making it hard for foreign competitors at the same time.

As a member of a local makerspace I usually meet three kinds of people doing similar things with similar tools. But the culture is very differnt.

The classic hobbyists and model makers build stuff on their own and maybe present the result at the end. They have been around forever.

The inventors and artists build stuff in secrecy to commercialize the result. They have been around forever too.

The makers are a quite new phenomenon. They build things to share the whole process and the final result with others. This is as much a social activity as it is a technical one. I Think in the old days when sharing was hard, the makers used to be either hobbyists or inventors.

PS: Please remove the autoplay of the video!
 

Yes and no. Not buying this product is a start, but the overall solution isn't that easy.

This works as long as there are interchangeable products. It kind of worked for songs in the last years. This really surprised me.

Buying intelligently might work for films too. Buy DVDs with "cracked" DRM instead of blue-ray discs. And there exist a few cable/satellite receivers that legally save encrypted films as plain unencrypted files. So choose wisely. But DVDs offer worse quality than blue-ray discs and keeping up with cable/satellite tv encryption (in legal ways) can be a hassle that "normal" people won't take.

But it doesn't work for software. Windows, Linux, Mac and others are not easily interchangeable. And unshackled windows versions do not exist.

And finally. Do we want our culture completely regulated by the market?

It's not that hard. Software and any kind of media (books, films, music,...) is part of our culture. And therefore the information needs to be accessible kind of forever. So either it is published DRM free in a publically accepted standard format or the publisher has to take measures to make sure that the material is accessible forever. He has to build up accruals that allow to keep the information accessible for the next let's say 500 years. Including all computer architecture changes.

You're right.
This is a stopgap solution especially useful for germany and some other european countries.
Germany has decided that nuclear fission is not their way to go. But unfortunately nuclear fusion will not be available for at least another 30 years. And germany will never be completely self-sustaining energy wise with renewable energy sources.
In addition to that germany has already pushed its possibilities of efficiently using energy and many other resources near the feasible maximum. To get further improvement you either have to make the peoples lifes miserable or introduce new technologies.