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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An expos 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 storyand, given the current anti-regulatory mood, one likely to be repeated. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It is a corporate scandal to rival Enron and Lehman Brothers. Volkswagen, maker of cars that have captured the imagination of everyone from Hitler to hippies, continues to be embroiled in an international legal battle over its willful efforts to deceive consumers and regulators by circumventing emission-standards testing. Spurred by a goal of becoming the world's largest automaker, VW forfeited engineering prowess for marketing sleight of hand in promoting its clean diesel technology. In reality, its use of a software program known as a defeat device enables VW diesel engines to detect emissions-testing conditions versus regular on-road situations and alter performance results accordingly. As a result, tons of nitrogen-oxide pollutants were released into the atmosphere, and thousands of ecoconscious auto buyers were duped into believing they had made an environmentally sound car purchase when, in fact, their VWs poisoned the atmosphere as much as a tractor-trailer. Tracing the origins of the corporate culture that created this blatantly fraudulent business practice back to Volkswagen's genesis as Hitler's People's Car, 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.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Vintage, $16.95.) In her first novel since her Booker Prize-winning book, "The God of Small Things," Roy explores India's political turmoil, particularly the Kashmiri separatist movement, through the lives of social outcasts. Our reviewer, Karan Mahajan, praised the story's "sheer fidelity and beauty of detail," writing that Roy the novelist has returned "fully and brilliantly intact." WHERE THE WATER GOES: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen. (Riverhead, $16.) The Colorado is in peril. Drought, climate change and overuse are draining the river - an important source of water, electricity and food. Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, visits farms, reservoirs and power plants along its route, and considers what actions could help preserve the river. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, by Bethany Ball. (Grove, $16.) A financial scandal threatens to upend the branches of a Jewish family in this wry debut novel. When Marc, an Israeli transplant in Los Angeles, is implicated in a laundering scheme, the Solomons back on a Jordan River Valley kibbutz must try to make sense of the news. Balancing literary and political history, Ball renders her characters with sensitivity and strains of dark humor. MARTIN LUTHER: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. (Random House, $20.) A penetrating biography focuses on Luther's upbringing, religious formation and inner life as he articulated his theological arguments and grappled with fame and scrutiny. "I want to understand Luther himself," Roper, a historian at Oxford, writes of her project. "I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body." RISE THE DARK, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) In Montana, a messianic leader plans to shut down a power grid that supplies electricity to half the country, with a woman taken hostage to ensure the scheme goes through. Her captor is the same man that Markus Novak, a private investigator and the central character, believes killed his wife, drawing together a painful personal reckoning and terrorist plot. SURFING WITH SARTRE: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning, by Aaron James. (Anchor, $15.95.) The author, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, outlines the system of meaning underpinning his favorite pastime. As James writes, if he were to debate with Sartre, one of his intellectual heroes, he'd draw on the tao of surfing: its ideas about freedom, power, happiness and control.
Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Building an Empire: Volkswagen's Path to World Domination | p. ix |
The Porsche and Piëch Families and Volkswagen | p. xi |
Chapter 1 Road Trip | p. 1 |
Chapter 2 The Grandson | p. 5 |
Chapter 3 Renaissance | p. 19 |
Chapter 4 The Scion | p. 27 |
Chapter 5 Chief Executive | p. 33 |
Chapter 6 By All Means Necessary | p. 50 |
Chapter 7 Enforcers | p. 67 |
Chapter 8 Impossible Doesn't Exist | p. 82 |
Chapter 9 Labor Relations | p. 100 |
Chapter 10 The Cheat | p. 112 |
Chapter 11 The Porsches and the Piëchs | p. 129 |
Chapter 12 Clean Diesel | p. 145 |
Chapter 13 Enforcers II | p. 159 |
Chapter 14 On the Road | p. 166 |
Chapter 15 Exposure | p. 176 |
Chapter 16 Piëch's Fall | p. 186 |
Chapter 17 Confession | p. 192 |
Chapter 18 Empire | p. 201 |
Chapter 19 Aftermath | p. 211 |
Chapter 20 Justice | p. 224 |
Chapter 21 Punishment | p. 249 |
Chapter 22 Faster, Higher, Farther | p. 259 |
Epilogue | p. 265 |
Acknowledgments | p. 275 |
Notes | p. 277 |
Index | p. 317 |