I knew someone with a shitty pickup truck where he wired a light switch into the fuel pump and hid it under the steering column. The truck would be stolen something like 5 times a year and every time he would find it abandoned a km or so away when the gas in the line ran out.

I drove in it once to get lunch and near the beginning the car begins sputtering and he's like, "oh right, you're thirsty" and reached under and flicked the switch. So understated, I still laugh at the memory.

When I was younger here in the Netherlands a lot of us had tweaked motorcycles/scooters that would go much faster than the allowed cap of 50km/h.

Many had a "cop switch". Cops suspecting you messed with the engine would put the scooter on a test belt to measure its maximum speed. The cop switch would instantly cap it to the allowed speed. Mine was hidden in the left mirror, a minor adjustment would activate it.

Sounds like a VW: behaves differently under test.

Schrödinger’s Volkswagen