Faster, Higher, Farther

The Volkswagen Scandal

By: Jack Ewing

Narrated by: Joel Richards

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.

©2017 Jack Ewing (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Good book, but it takes long to get to the scandal

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, but the first half is way to detailed compared to the scandal part.

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

Short and unexpected.

Which scene was your favorite?

Scandal part.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Nope.

Well-written and comprehensive

Well-written business narrative with good historical perspective. Considerate and unbiased. To understand the scandal, you have to appreciate the context of the situation and the nature of the person(s) who dominated the corporation and its culture. This book delivers both.

Even as a former TDI ower I didn't know all!

A very deep dive into the full story. was great. should be in schools. I recommend

A must listen if you care about the auto industry

I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the VW scandal but I now realize it was much worse than I realized. While the book is a little light on some of the details of the auto industry in the earlier part of the book, leaving out details in an effort not to be boring, it does a good job of describing the culture and mismanagement that led to this deception. it is not too heavy or technical that someone that knows little about the auto industry can follow the details.

Very well researched but too long

This is an important book yet parts of that appear redundant and is the point of the book or points of the book could have been stated in fewer pages. I’d like to give it five stars but it is so long-unnecessarily so. Basically progeny of a friend of Hitler’s and his relatives who would no doubt extra engineers, deceived the world into thinking that they had reduced NOX compounds In diesel passenger vehicles when actually they were putting 40 times as much as they should have been. A true travesty. Polluting the world 40 times greater than it was being pulled over there at all in the name of greed and dynasty