Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal

by Jack Ewing

Overview

A shocking exposé of Volkswagen’s fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal.

In mid-2015, Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world’s largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017, VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming. In Faster, Higher, Farther, Jack Ewing rips the lid off the conspiracy. He describes VW’s rise from “the people’s car” during the Nazi era to one of Germany’s most prestigious and important global brands, touted for being “green.” He paints vivid portraits of Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch and chief executive Martin Winterkorn, arguing that the corporate culture they fostered drove employees, working feverishly in pursuit of impossible sales targets, to illegal methods. Unable to build cars that could meet emissions standards in the United States honestly, engineers were left with no choice but to cheat. Volkswagen then compounded the fraud by spending millions marketing “clean diesel,” only to have the lie exposed by a handful of researchers on a shoestring budget, resulting in a guilty plea to criminal charges in a landmark Department of Justice case. Faster, Higher, Farther reveals how the succeed-at-all-costs mentality prevalent in modern boardrooms led to one of corporate history’s farthest-reaching cases of fraud—with potentially devastating consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393254501
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jack Ewing has covered business and economics from Frankfurt for The New York Times since 2010. He has worked as a journalist in Germany since 1994, including over a decade as a BusinessWeek correspondent.

Table of Contents

Building an Empire: Volkswagen's Path to World Domination ix

The Porsche and Piëch Families and Volkswagen xi

Chapter 1 Road Trip 1

Chapter 2 The Grandson 5

Chapter 3 Renaissance 19

Chapter 4 The Scion 27

Chapter 5 Chief Executive 33

Chapter 6 By All Means Necessary 50

Chapter 7 Enforcers 67

Chapter 8 Impossible Doesn't Exist 82

Chapter 9 Labor Relations 100

Chapter 10 The Cheat 112

Chapter 11 The Porsches and the Piëchs 129

Chapter 12 Clean Diesel 145

Chapter 13 Enforcers II 159

Chapter 14 On the Road 166

Chapter 15 Exposure 176

Chapter 16 Piëch's Fall 186

Chapter 17 Confession 192

Chapter 18 Empire 201

Chapter 19 Aftermath 211

Chapter 20 Justice 224

Chapter 21 Punishment 249

Chapter 22 Faster, Higher, Farther 259

Epilogue 265

Acknowledgments 275

Notes 277

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

This will go down in history books as a great corporate scandal, but the story told by…Jack Ewing in his new book, Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal, is also much more than that. It's a rich history of a company whose cars, for better and worse, have touched millions of lives, a character study of a brilliant but deeply flawed leader, and a case study in how a corporate culture can turn toxic—or as Ewing writes, Volkswagen "vividly shows how a dysfunctional corporate culture can threaten the existence of even the mightiest corporations."

The New York Times Book Review - Bethany McLean

03/20/2017
New York Times reporter Ewing has written a fascinating exposé of Volkswagen’s rise to becoming the world’s largest auto maker, a goal the company reached in 2015 just months before scandal broke over its emissions fraud. Ewing creates a compelling narrative out of corporate history, tracing Volkswagen’s growth from 1937 to the present to show the evolution of a strikingly top-down, hierarchical culture. Most interesting to many readers will be Volkswagen’s genesis as the “people’s car,” a Nazi propaganda tactic and particular pet project of Hitler’s that was intended to showcase Germany’s coming prosperity. Fast-forward to the 21st century, when new environmental concerns put a damper on this rapid growth. The challenge for regulators lay in both measuring dangerous emissions and working out how to apply those measurements to a wide variety of cars and the conditions under which they are driven. Ewing’s compelling prose makes his book read like entertainment more than education, and the story of Volkswagen’s fall—how the company cheated emissions-testing devices, was exposed by West Virginia University researchers, and, finally, was publicly cited by the EPA—is a study in corporate hubris. Interest in this now-faded scandal may be confined to a niche audience, but readers who pick up the book will be glad they did. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A shocking and incredibly compelling exposé of one of the great corporate scandals of all time....reads like a fast-paced thriller."

The Guardian

"Perversely engaging."

Barron's

"A damning indictment of corporate malfeasance and…an accessible account of one of the most expensive business mistakes ever recorded."

Financial Times - Patrick McGee

"This will go down in history books as a great corporate scandal , but the story told by the New York Times reporter Jack Ewing…is also much more than that. It’s a rich history of a company whose cars, for better and worse, have touched millions of lives, a character study of a brilliant but deeply flawed leader, and a case study in how a corporate culture can turn toxic."

Bethany McLean

"Exhaustive."

Richard Epstein

"Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal takes readers through the combination of pressures that produced what may be the biggest corporate scandal ever, detailing the company’s personalities and the history behind the saga with fluency and wit."

The Atlantic

"It is a corporate scandal to rival Enron and Lehman Brothers....Ewing weaves a conspiratorial tale of corporate greed run amok. Capturing the public fascination with craven financial scandals, and with a movie in the works, Ewing’s sordid saga is the latest addition to the history of corporate fraud."

Booklist (starred review)

04/15/2017
From 2009 to 2015, Volkswagen sold 11 million cars with software installed to deceive governmental authorities regarding emissions emanating from the vehicles. In this book, which meticulously chronicles "one of the greatest corporate scandals ever," business journalist Ewing begins by offering a history of the company, focusing on the rise of Ferdinand Piëch to chief executive officer and chairman of the supervisory board. Ewing argues that while there is no evidence linking Piëch to the deception, it arose from a corporate culture that he had a good deal in creating and fostering. According to Ewing, the climate was insular, authoritarian, very aggressive, and not overly concerned with following legal norms; and, on top of all that, the company had weak internal controls. While manufacturing cars of quality under Piëch's leadership, the company also engaged in criminal behavior beyond the deceptive software scandal. The book's prose is straightforward. Some of Ewing's sources are anonymous. VERDICT A readable account of a major scandal that will attract those interested in the auto industry and those concerned about the environment.—Shmuel Ben-Gad, Gelman Lib., George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Library Journal

2017-04-04
An exposé of the scandal that threatened to bring one of the world's greatest automobile manufacturers to ruin.By installing "defeat devices" and software designed to underreport automobile emissions, Volkswagen executives violated international laws and protocols. What surprises most about that decision, writes New York Times European economic correspondent Ewing, is that there was no clear motivation for it: the people responsible were not enriched by it, and indeed they took "enormous risk for such a modest gain" given that the unit savings were so small. Something larger than mere gain must have motivated them. But what? In this thoroughgoing account of the affair, the author ventures a few guesses. Mostly, though, this is straight reportage, a narrative that begins with the discovery of a crime by graduate students who proved that an ordinary, street-level Jetta "was producing way more nitrogen oxides than a modern long-haul diesel truck." Ewing's discussion can get deeply technical at times, given that "pollution control systems," as he writes, "are complex rolling chemistry labs" and that sometimes all it takes is a stuck valve or a glitch in the car's computer to ruin the performance of those systems. Still, those control systems were selling points for diesel cars, with one early VW line boasting "a particularly elegant combination of fuel injection, turbocharging, and electronics that could be produced cheaply enough for midrange cars." What went wrong went badly wrong, and it was especially enraging to environmentally sensitive buyers who had bought Passats, Golfs, and other models precisely to do their part in saving the planet. Meanwhile, as the author reports in a narrative that soon turns to true crime, albeit of the white-collar variety, it was VW's foot soldiers who took the fall, at least at first, despite the $15 billion fine imposed for violations of the Clean Air Act and other laws. A shocking, sobering story—and, given the current anti-regulatory mood, one likely to be repeated.

Kirkus Reviews