I wonder if Volkswagen would've blamed AI if they got caught with Dieselgate nowadays...

In PR-lese: "To improve quality and reduce costs, we used AI to program some test code. Unfortunately the test code the AI generated fell below our standards, and it was missed during QA.".

Then again they got their supplier Bosch to program the "defeat device" and lied to them that "Oh don't worry, it's just for testing, we won't deploy it to production". (The "device" (probably just an algorithm) detects whether the steering wheel was being moved or not as the throttle is pushed, and if not, it assumes the car was undergoing emissions testing, and it runs the engine in the environmentally friendlier mode).