This sounds very similar to the Mikado Method: https://www.manning.com/books/the-mikado-method ?

Edit: rephrased to be more passive

To those saying "it was the dealers, not Audi" I would say that becoming a dealer (in the UK at least) for a brand like Audi is not a simple matter of just applying to stick the Audi/VW badge up over the door. Audi have a responsibility to vet their official dealers. It's the expectation here. So it was the dealers directly, but since they are acting as Audi's representatives, I'd consider Audi to be culpable also.

I don't know about UK, but in US I have a blast every time I go to a dealership cause of all the fibbing and BS I hear. Of course it's not every salesman, but it happens a lot. One time I was buying a Dodge minivan and I was using the safety rating which I had compared earlier as a reason it should pay even less. The salesman told me I was wrong, that it had the best safety rating cause the steel was thicker! He even said I should check on his computer! I mean this is like poker level stuff. I have heard the best stories when buying cars - like about hidden underground ICBM launch sites where I work, alien abduction, crazy stuff about Denver airport, how one guy had been a sniper or spy or something - I love it, it cracks me up inside. I expect UK dealerships to be similar.

Well, we have strict advertising and trading standards laws.

I imagine that some simple hidden camera work would be enough to make UK agencies take action - perhaps fake customers of their own - and then take legal enforcement.

I am kind of surprised that "regulatory enforcemen as a service" does not exist. Many complaints to the UK ad regulator come from competitors in the same industry.

The UK government department with responsibility for business got into some trouble when they issued a leaflet about "dirty tricks" - which included (if I remember correctly) 'dumpster diving' to get information. (This would have been before 2003 and probably before 2000, bt my web searching is too weak to find references.)

Yes, but as mentioned in the article, concerns had been raised five months before the BBC investigation. Which suggests that Audi only care about being caught.

Of course, StringUtils is not in the core API; the first idiom "foo".equals(bar) works in Java everywhere, StringUtils.equals("foo", bar) will only work in projects that pull in org.apache.commons. Personally I prefer using facilities in the core API over third party APIs, even if the third party API is included anyway for some essential function.

I've been coding in Java for over 10 years. If I ran across pretty much any project that wasn't including Apache commons I'd be startled. I get your point, but some libraries are in such common use that for all practical purposes I consider them part of the language API.