Volkswagen is rarely out of the news these days, but the stories hardly paint a coherent picture. One report says VW is planning to offer “generous” compensation to American owners of VW cars with software designed to cheat on emissions tests. Yet another says that the trickery may not have been illegal in Europe, where auto manufacturers can apparently determine engine settings for pollution testing, making sure their test cars will pass even if the cars on the road never would. Does that mean the scandal is all about testing standards?

No, it does not. Though European regulators are notoriously more lax in their testing and have long had an accommodating relationship with the auto industry, the salient point is that Volkswagen and other major auto producers are well aware that the nitrogen oxides exhausted by diesel engines lead to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, smog and acid rain, and cause premature deaths — in Europe as in America — and have deceived the public about controlling them. That is what the scandal is all about.

Volkswagen, which has considerable experience with diesel engines and, until the scandal, had ambitions to be the world’s largest auto producer, should have been the leader in clean diesel — and indeed that’s what it claimed to be in its loud “Clean Diesel” advertising campaign. Yet even now, VW — and quite possibly other automakers — seems unable to understand that from the public’s point of view, the problem was not so much cheating on tests as concealing the threat that its cars posed to the health of the public.

Volkswagen’s chief executive, Matthias Mueller, no doubt meant it at the Detroit auto show last month when he declared yet again that he was “truly sorry.” Yet as long as VW and other car manufacturers see emissions testing, in the United States or in Europe, as a purely technical hurdle to be managed through heavy lobbying, cagey engineering, deft public relations and liberal payouts, the real problem will not be solved.