Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Faster, Higher, Farther
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1955
WEBSITE:
CITY: Frankfurt
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY:
https://muckrack.com/jack-ewing * http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294993888 * https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/ewing-volkswagen-scandal/527835/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017028557
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017028557
HEADING: Ewing, Jack, 1955-
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100 1_ |a Ewing, Jack, |d 1955-
400 1_ |a Ewing, John Thomas, |d 1955-
670 __ |a Faster, higher, farther, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Jack Ewing) data view (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)
670 __ |a Emailed publisher, May 17, 2017: |b (John Thomas Ewing, Jr., b. Oct. 6, 1955)
PERSONAL
Born October 6, 1955.
EDUCATION:Hampshire College, B.A., 1979; Trinity College-Hartford, M.A., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
BBDO, copywriter, 1976-1980; Santa Fe Reporter, Santa Fe, NM, reporter, 1981-1983; North Shore Weeklies, Ipswich, MA, , editor, 1983-1984; Hartford Courant, Hartford, CT, reporter, 1984-1994; Bloomberg News, Frankfurt, Germany, reporter and editor, 1995-1999; Bloomberg Businessweek, correspondent and European regional editor, 1999-2009; New York Times, New York, NY, European economics correspondent, 2010–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jack Ewing began his work in journalism as a reporter with the Santa Fe Reporter in 1981. Since then he has moved through the ranks as an editor and correspondent for various outlets and publications, including the Hartford Courant and Bloomberg News. He moved to Brussels in the early 1990s, when he won a German Marshall Fund journalism fellowship. In 2010 he became the New York Times European economics correspondent, working from Frankfurt, Germany. His focus is on business, banking, economics, and monetary policy. In 2011 he garnered a New York Times publisher’s award for his coverage of the European debt crisis.
Ewing’s first book is Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. The scandal referenced developed over years of poor executive decisions made in Volkswagen’s relentless pursuit of becoming the top-selling carmaker in the world. In conversation with Nicholas Clairmont of the Atlantic, Ewing described how this ambition caused Volkswagen, the maker of the popular Beetle, to commit “one of the great frauds in corporate history, producing millions of diesel-powered cars fitted with ‘defeat devices’ that modified the engines’ real-world performance when they sensed they were in lab-testing conditions.” When the scandal broke, Volkswagen mystifyingly chose to “to stall, twist the truth, shirk blame, and to a remarkable degree refuse to change.” Ewing tells the story of the scandal beginning with the company’s history, dating back to the Nazi era and Adolf Hitler’s idea to create “the people’s car” and moving through shady dealings of the early postwar years. In the interview with Clairmont, Ewing voices his surprise and concern that after a year and a half, the company and its culture have changed little, even after the imposition of fines running into the billions of dollars.
A Kirkus Reviews correspondent noted that Ewing tells readers that the company did not make money from this deception, which makes the story even more mystifying. The reviewer called this a “shocking, sobering story—and, given the current anti-regulatory mood, one likely to be repeated.” Carol Haggas, in Booklist, remarked that in “capturing the public fascination with craven financial scandals,” Ewing successfully “weaves a conspiratorial tale of corporate greed run amok.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly termed this a “fascinating . . . study in corporate hubris.” A reviewer at the Economist called Faster, Higher, Farther “a timely guide.” Ferdinand Piech, the executive who was in charge when the fraud began, left Volkswagen before the scandal broke, and his successor, Martin Winterkorn, resigned. Various employees have been charged with crimes and others, including the present CEO, Matthias Muller, are under investigation. The Economist reviewer concluded: “Mr Ewing’s tale will need a new edition with extra chapters.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Carol Haggas, review of Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal, p. 46.
Bookwatch, July, 2017, review of Faster, Higher, Farther.
Economist, June 3, 2017, review of Faster, Higher, Farther, p. 76.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of Faster, Higher, Farther.
Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2017, review of Faster, Higher, Farther , p. 65.
ONLINE
Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (May 23, 2017), Nicholas Clairmont, “Volkswagen’s Diesel Scandal Was 80 Years in the Making,”author interview.
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 30, 2017), author profile.
Jack Ewing
Jack Ewing writes about business, banking, economics and monetary policy from Frankfurt, and sometimes helps out on terror coverage and other breaking news. Jack joined The International Herald Tribune, now the international edition of The New York Times, in 2010. Previously, he worked for a decade at BusinessWeek magazine in Frankfurt, where he was European regional editor. Jack first came to Europe in 1993 as a German Marshall Fund journalism fellow in Brussels, and wound up staying permanently. He won a New York Times publisher’s award in 2011 for coverage of the European debt crisis. Jack is the author of “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal,” published in 2017 by W.W. Norton.
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Volkswagen's Diesel Scandal Was 80 Years in the Making
A conversation with the reporter Jack Ewing, whose new book explores what led to the company's deadly decision to cheat emissions regulations.
Beetles are assembled on production lines at Volkswagen's Wolfsburg, West Germany, plant in 1954.
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NICHOLAS CLAIRMONT MAY 23, 2017 BUSINESS
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Herbie the Love Bug was dreamt up by Adolf Hitler. The iconic Volkswagen Beetle, as it came to be known, was originally marketed to the subjects of the Third Reich as the KdF-wagen, or “strength through joy”-car. Few Beetles were actually produced during the Nazi era, as the firm’s Wolfsburg factory put its resources mainly towards the war effort. But eventually, in occupied postwar West Germany, the brilliantly designed little VW, air-cooled, cheap, and surprisingly spacious, started rolling off the line in big numbers, and a car born from fascism became an unlikely phenomenon, especially among free Europe’s rising middle class and, later, the anti-authoritarian counterculture that developed on both sides of the Atlantic. By the new millennium, VW Group was one of the biggest players in the global auto industry, and it owned a bouquet of prestigious marques, including Rolls Royce, Audi, and Porsche.
In 2016, the company met an audacious, seemingly impossible goal set by a string of single-minded chief executives: It beat the GMs and Toyotas of the world to become the top-selling automaker globally, two years ahead of schedule. But by then, it was no time for celebrating, with the automaker fighting against an ongoing scandal that threatened to destroy everything it had built: In the relentless drive to reach ambitious benchmarks imposed from the top, the company perpetrated one of the great frauds in corporate history, producing millions of diesel-powered cars fitted with “defeat devices” that modified the engines’ real-world performance when they sensed they were in lab-testing conditions. Once caught, VW didn’t come clean, choosing instead to stall, twist the truth, shirk blame, and to a remarkable degree refuse to change. (Volkswagen did not offer comment on specific facts mentioned in this article, but in a statement said that the company had “taken significant steps to strengthen accountability, enhance transparency and prevent something like this from happening again,” and pointed to a “series of agreements which offer a resolution to all customers with affected vehicles” in the U.S.)
The reporter Jack Ewing has been covering the scandal faithfully from Germany for The New York Times since it broke. His timely new book, 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. I recently spoke to Ewing about the ongoing scandal, what it means for Volkswagen, and what it says about the future of how cars will be powered. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Nicholas Clairmont: One of the most striking things in the book was how you traced themes from the early history of Volkswagen through to the current scandal. A lot of people may not know that Volkswagen’s story begins in the Nazi era.
Jack Ewing: I think a lot of this wasn't all that well known even in Germany. I made some discoveries myself when I started researching the book. Just the fact that the [Nazi-era Volkswagenwerks] factory basically functioned as a concentration camp during the war, and also that the members of the Porsche family, primarily Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch, absconded with the cash in the final days of the war and then later built the private company in order to justify taking the money. It's an interesting question how much that contributed to the culture that later grew up at Volkswagen [of imposing ambitious engineering goals from the top, and punishing anyone who suggested that they might not be feasible.]
In 1992, Ferdinand Piëch, the grandson of [VW’s founder and the designer of the Beetle] Ferdinand Porsche, became the chief executive. He's the one who really then created the corporate culture that existed when the cheating, the fraud, first came into being. So I think the connection is in a way a family connection.
Clairmont: In the book, you also brought up some more structural causes of the scandal. It sounds like one key feature of the company is that, thanks to a settlement in the 1940s between the Porsche-Piëch family and the occupying coalition in postwar West Germany, the regional government and employees get seats on the corporate board. Can you talk about how that shapes how executives behave?
Ewing: Right, the structural thing is the degree of power that the workers have. The temptation this created for management was, you never had to worry about any outsiders if you could appease the workers and the state of Lower Saxony . It allowed the chief executives, if they were willing to sort of make this pact with the workers and the politicians, to have almost dictatorial power, more power than one would get at other companies. There was no real oversight from shareholders.
Clairmont: I want to ask about the role America plays in the context of the Volkswagen scandal. If I were a European Volkswagen customer, I would of course feel cheated by Volkswagen. But I would also feel cheated by the regulators in Europe, who didn’t do a good job enforcing the rules, and I'd feel cheated by the U.S., in that the $20 billion-plus in penalties that America has now levied against Volkswagen eat up most of what Volkswagen can stand to pay out worldwide. Is there another, unmentioned scandal here in terms of how European regulators and other officials have handled things?
"These effects are sort of invisible... It's not like a car drives by and somebody keels over."
Ewing: Yeah, that’s one of the big things that this case has exposed. I think there's a tendency for Europeans to feel like they're superior to Americans on environmental issues. But what emerged from this case was that America, first of all, has stricter emissions standards. And the U.S. enforces them. Even though Europe had a lot of the same rules on the books—almost word-for-word the same rules—they just weren't enforced at all. It was a total joke. That’s something Europeans have certainly noticed.
There's also the financial factor, where a lot of Volkswagen owners in Germany were basically getting nothing and saying, "Why do the Americans get so much, and we get nothing?"
Finally, there is resentment, particularly among some people in Germany, that the fallout is draining resources from Volkswagen in a way that could permanently damage the company. The jury's out on that, but all carmakers are very worried about the future. They're expecting big changes in the auto industry, from self-driving, from electrics. And they need to put as much as they can into research and development. The damages represent $22 billion or more that is being siphoned off to the U.S. government and American owners. It could well cripple Volkswagen's future ability to deal with all of these changes.
Clairmont: There are things that make the Volkswagen case a particularly huge story, but Volkswagen’s is not the first defeat device ever discovered. What is the history behind this?
Ewing: Well, one of the things about the VW scandal that left people in the United States kind of astonished is that there had been this big case around the end of the 1990s where the truck makers were found cheating, and they had to pay around a billion dollars when all was said and done. It seemed like a huge amount at the time. That sort of put everybody on notice. It was so clear that you were not supposed to do it, and that the penalties could be severe.
Clairmont: Can you state what the stakes are when cars emit more pollutants than promised?
Ewing: The main pollutant is nitrogen oxide, which is actually a group of a bunch of gases that are byproducts of diesel motors. It causes people to develop asthma, especially children. If you already have asthma, it can cause you to have an attack. It causes bronchitis. It's linked to cancer, although there's some debate about whether it's just a marker or the actual cause. Nitrogen dioxide, one form of nitrogen oxide, is the main cause of smog. So that's particularly a problem in big cities.
There have been a lot of studies, and they are all sort of extrapolating, but they conclude that certainly there have been significant numbers of premature deaths which you can trace back to nitrogen oxide. How many depends on the study. In Europe it's in the tens of thousands of premature deaths. It's quite serious.
“Not only did they cheat, but then they went out and crowed about how clean they were.”
These effects are sort of invisible, because it's a long-term effect. It's hard to isolate. It's not like a car drives by and somebody keels over. That makes it kind of easy to ignore. In a way it's sort of like the tobacco companies. But the cumulative effect is enormous, and people in Europe are waking up to that.
Clairmont: One of the things that's so upsetting about this is that when I think of the Volkswagen owners and enthusiasts I know, it's a betrayal of exactly what they liked about their cars.
Ewing: Right, that was the other big thing they did. Not only did they cheat, but then they went out and crowed about how clean they were. That turned what was already a pretty serious regulatory violation into a consumer fraud. And that's one reason why it turned out to be so expensive for Volkswagen. They did everything wrong you possibly could. But in Europe, there's not that much recourse for consumers. Most of the countries don't have class-action suits. It's very hard for consumers to go after a company that's cheated them this way.
Clairmont: One of the things that the book raises and doesn't quite answer—there may not be an answer out there—is that a lot of the deception at the VW Group seems to trace back to the Audi division specifically. Do you have any guesses as to why this is?
Ewing: That's an interesting question. It does seem to have been something that originated at Audi, although the Volkswagen brand is where they sort of put it into mass production. I guess there would be two explanations. One is that a lot of the advanced technology comes from Audi because that's the premium brand. They're often the first to have any kind of new feature or technology, which then spreads around the company—in this case in a negative way.
Second, it raises the question of whether this was a habitual way of dealing with problems. Since this had been done at Audi for years and then spread to Volkswagen, you get the feeling this was something that they had done before, despite denials from Volkswagen insisting that this was a few rogue engineers. But it really seems to be something that was habitual.
Clairmont: A chapter of your book is called “Justice.” Where do things stand now with the company and its management?
Ewing: I'm fairly critical of [how little has changed] in the book. Basically, Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO, resigned. And then a whole bunch of mid-level people were disciplined or fired or suspended. But the current chief executive, Matthias Müller, was very involved in engine development for the last decade, and he's still running the company. The chairman of the supervisory board, Hans Dieter Pötsch, was the chief financial officer of Volkswagen throughout the whole period of the cheating. He's only gotten promoted as a result of the whole thing. It's still really the same group of people who are running the company.
Clairmont: The annual shareholder’s meeting happened recently. What's the latest news on the future of Volkswagen?
Ewing: Basically, they talk a lot about creating a new company culture. But Pötsch, the head of the supervisory board, said the company wasn’t going to release the internal report they’d commissioned from Jones Day, the law firm that they hired for this big internal investigation. Some shareholders are pretty upset about that.
It just shows how this is still an issue more than a year and a half after it first came to light. And it really shouldn't be. With better crisis management they could have put this behind them in six months or so. But they would have had to make a lot more changes than they were willing to.
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Jack Ewing
Jack Ewing
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Leadership Lessons from Crisis: What we can learn from Volkswagen with David Bach, Deputy Dean of Management & Jack Ewing, The NY Times. @Yale School of Management @David Bach @Jack Ewing @The New York Times
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Leadership Lessons from Crisis: What we can learn from Volkswagen with David Bach, Deputy Dean of Management & Jack Ewing, The NY Times. @Yale School of Management @David Bach @Jack Ewing @The New York Times
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David Bach of the Yale School of Management and I discuss leadership lessons from the Volkswagen scandal.
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I'll be speaking about the Volkswagen scandal at the Yale School of Management on Tuesday Oct. 10. The event is open to the public and will also be webcast; here's a link.
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European Economics Correspondent
Company NameThe New York Times
Dates EmployedJan 2010 – Present Employment Duration7 yrs 10 mos
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I cover European business and economics for The New York Times. I'm based in Frankfurt.
BusinessWeek magazine
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Education
Trinity College-Hartford
Trinity College-Hartford
Degree NameMaster's Field Of StudyHistory
Dates attended or expected graduation 1990 – 1998
Hampshire College
Hampshire College
Degree NameB.A. Field Of StudyCommunication and Media Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 1973 – 1979
Champlain Valley Union High School
Champlain Valley Union High School
Degree NameHigh school diploma
Dates attended or expected graduation 1969 – 1972
George School
George School
Dates attended or expected graduation 1970 – 1971
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Print Marked Items
Bad smell; The Volkswagen emissions scandal
The Economist.
423.9043 (June 3, 2017): p76(US).
COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. By Jack Ewing. W.W. Norton; 352 pages. Bantam Press.
WHEN an American policeman pulled over a Volkswagen (VW) Jetta in 2013, he suspected that the array of pipes
sticking out of the back of the car and the grey box and portable generator in the vehicle were a sign of something
fishy. He was right. The West Virginia University researchers inside the car had nothing to hide. But the tests they were
conducting on the exhaust fumes, meant to prove the cleanliness of modern diesel engines, uncovered one of the
biggest and boldest frauds in corporate history. The decision by VW, a pillar of Germany's car industry, to fit "defeat
devices" and cheat emissions tests in up to 11m cars has so far cost the company $21bn in fines and compensation in
North America alone.
Why did the company deliberately set out to engineer cars that spewed out up to 35 times more poisonous nitrogen
oxides on the road than stated in official tests? Jack Ewing, a journalist for the New York Times, offers a timely guide
to the scandal, setting out in detail why VW's corporate culture led to the deception.
He delves into VW's origins, when Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of a "people's car", or Volkswagen in
German. VW set up shop in the German countryside. Wolfsburg bred a "headquarters mentality" that insulated the firm
from outside influence. Unprecedented union power, handed over in the 1960s as the price the federal government paid
for floating the firm on the stockmarket, and the sway of the state of Lower Saxony, which retained a 20% voting stake
in the company, gave outside shareholders little say.
This allowed autocratic bosses to have their way. Ferdinand Piech became chief executive in 1993 at a time when the
company was struggling. To win back sales, Mr Ewing argues, he created the conditions that allowed the fraud to
"fester". To keep workers onside, the company had to carry on growing. Managers were kept quiet through fear. The
ruthless Mr Piech replaced almost the entire management board by his second year in the job.
His successor as CEO, Martin Winterkorn, a man cut from the same cloth, wanted the firm to become the world's
biggest carmaker. An assault on the American market, where VW was weak and emissions regulations much tighter
than in Europe, was vital to overtaking Toyota and General Motors. To meet that demanding target, though, VW had to
cheat.
Mr Ewing explains why VW cheated, but pinpointing who was responsible has been much harder. The company insists
the deception was cooked up by middle managers and that senior bosses, despite a reputation for microscopic attention
to detail, knew nothing of the fraud until it was too late. If there is clear evidence implicating bigger fish it has yet to
emerge.
The scandal still haunts VW, despite a settlement with American law enforcers and compensation for American carbuyers.
European customers are pursuing class-action lawsuits for compensation, though VW insists it did nothing
wrong in Europe, where the rules are laxer. Mr Piech left the company before the scandal erupted and Mr Winterkorn
has since resigned. Several employees have been arrested or charged with criminal offences in America. German
prosecutors are investigating nearly 40 employees and have begun a probe into Matthias Muller, the latest CEO and
another long-serving insider, for failing to warn shareholders in a timely manner about the scandal. The company has
denied those allegations. In any event, Mr Ewing's tale will need a new edition with extra chapters.
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Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal.
By Jack Ewing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bad smell; The Volkswagen emissions scandal." The Economist, 3 June 2017, p. 76(US). General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA493846547&it=r&asid=75f6500538f400c52dbd4e69ae3403ad.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
The Bookwatch.
(July 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
Jack Ewing
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
9780393254501 $27.95 www.wwnorton.com
Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal focuses on the revelation that Volkswagen had installed software in
its cars to thwart emissions testing devices: a fact that led to massive recalls, lawsuits, and scandal that revealed not
just Volkswagen's actions, but the depths to which efforts went to circumvent the law. Surprisingly, this is the first book
to, years later, discuss the power, corruption, and high-level involvements behind the company's deception and coverup.
These details reveal not just one company's actions and illegalities, but the dangerous connections between
business and political interests which allowed it to occur unchecked until whistleblowers revealed the truth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal." The Bookwatch, July 2017. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA501397175&it=r&asid=5b6891602ae617a2e9fdad823979f2d4.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501397175
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Ewing , Jack: FASTER, HIGHER, FARTHER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ewing , Jack FASTER, HIGHER, FARTHER Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 5, 23 ISBN: 978-0-393-25450-1
An expose 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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ewing , Jack: FASTER, HIGHER, FARTHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA489268464&it=r&asid=eb2624c137ec9a640368ede9e78d398f.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489268464
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Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. By Jack Ewing. May 2017. 320p. illus. Norton, $27.95
(9780393254501). 629.2.
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 worlds 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.--Carol Haggas
Haggas, Carol
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 46. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495035000&it=r&asid=d4fca0fb79d571a73a5e0a35eadd8b89.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035000
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Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
Publishers Weekly.
264.12 (Mar. 20, 2017): p65.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
Jack Ewing. Norton, $27.95 (320p)
ISBN 978-0-393-25450-1
New York Times reporter Ewing has written a fascinating expose 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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal." Publishers Weekly, 20 Mar. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487601798&it=r&asid=437c4c7f330e6be6cfe911f7e8a34bb7.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487601798