Unable to build cars that could meet emissions standards in the United States honestly, engineers were left with no choice but to cheat. 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. 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". In Faster, Higher, Farther, Jack Ewing rips the lid off the conspiracy. By early 2017 VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. In mid-2015 Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world's largest automaker. The risk of scandal is great if top managers do not establish clear standards of behavior and display a disregard for societal norms with their own actions.A shocking exposé of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. Practically all corporate scandals stem at least in part from unrealistic targets coupled with draconian consequences for employees who fail to deliver, often combined with outsize rewards for the star performers. In his book, Ewing writes: "The pressure to meet corporate goals at any cost is hardly unique to Volkswagen. And this was just about trying to defend market share and I think meet the expectations that top management had set for employees, that the people who did this were really just trying to hang onto their jobs," Ewing, who covered the entire scandal, said Monday on "CBS This Morning." "If you look at the banking scandals, it was usually people who were trying to get big bonuses to make money. He's out with a new book called "Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal," which takes a behind-the-scenes look at the German automaker's fraud.
The biggest factor that separates the Volkswagen emissions scandal from other corporate scandals is that "money wasn't the motivation," according to author and New York Times European economics correspondent Jack Ewing.
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