Musk: Trickery “The Only Option” For Engineers In VW Scandal?

Although internal combustion engines are for the most part getting a little more efficient with every new model year, there’s no avoiding a cold fact: that whether they’re gasoline or diesel—or even a groundbreaking design under the hood of the 2016 Prius—they’re highly inefficient next to battery-electric vehicles.

That’s part of why Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk argues that electric cars are the future, while any improvements to internal-combustion engines will be smaller. “There must have been lots of VW engineers under pressure—they’ve run into a physical wall of what might be possible so trickery was the only option,” speculated Musk, in an interview with the UK publication Auto Express.

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That doesn’t, of course, excuse any bad behaviors—either of the engineers behind the so-called “defeat device,” or perhaps more importantly, of the executives who might have required, encouraged, or enabled it.