In mid-2015, Volkswagen proudly announced that it had achieved its goal of surpassing Toyota as the largest automaker in the world. A few months later, the American Environmental Protection Agency revealed that VW had installed software in eleven million cars that cheated emissions control systems.

By early 2018, VW had reached a settlement of twenty billion dollars with U.S. authorities and car owners, with additional lawsuits still awaiting resolution. In this book, Jack Ewing reveals all the details of the scandal.

He describes the rise of VW from the era of the "people's car" in Nazi Germany to one of the most prominent companies in Germany, which boasted of its "green" policies. The author vividly portrays the president and CEO of VW and demonstrates that the corporate culture they cultivated drove employees, who were striving to achieve elusive sales targets, to use illegal methods.

Unable to honestly produce cars that could comply with emission regulations in the U.S., the engineers had no choice but to commit fraud. And as if that weren't enough, VW then spent millions promoting "clean diesel," until the fraud was uncovered by a small group of poorly funded researchers.

The outcome was a guilty plea to felony charges in a landmark case handled by the U.S. Department of Justice. Jack Ewing eloquently shows how the mentality of success at any cost - so prevalent in the boardrooms of modern companies - led to one of the most significant fraud cases in business history, potentially with disastrous consequences.