Dieselgate was about cheating environment sensors. This is more like DeereGate, locking out external service shops but even when you are supposed by law to allow them service (and even after providing them 20k page service manuals which they are supposed to follow to make appropriate service, but you lock them out anyway).
From my reading, they also seem to have seeded apparently random failures into the product, with a hidden reset key combo, even for those using them as support. Possibly to make themselves look good (our products may break randomly, but at least we fixed the "problem" quickly) going into the tendering process for support.
