Faster, Higher, Farther
How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“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, New York Times Book Review
Faster, Higher, Farther chronicles a corporate scandal that rivals those at Enron and Lehman Brothers—one that will cost Volkswagen more than $22 billion in fines and settlements. Through meticulous reporting, New York Times correspondent Jack Ewing documents why VW felt compelled to install “defeat devices” in diesel vehicles that unlawfully lowered CO2 levels during emissions testing, and how the fraud was committed, covered up, and finally detected. Faster, Higher, Farther is a briskly written account of unrivaled corporate greed. Updated with the latest information and a new afterword by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times reporter Ewing has written a fascinating expos 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.
