Welcome back to bribes, swindler, steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're going to talk about the Volkswagen scandal.

My guest is a reporter who covers business and economics from Frankfurt. He spent over a decade at Business Week, and since 2010 he's been with the New York Times.

He's the author of Faster, Higher, Farther, The Volkswagen Scandal.

It's a great book that came out earlier this year about the unbelievably brazen fraud committed

by Volkswagen, as they tried to persuade car buyers to make what consumers

thought were environmentally friendly decisions to buy their diesel cars. It's really a ready-made

compliance case study. Jack Hewing, thanks so much for joining me from Germany today.

Alexander, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's a fascinating story,

but it's horrifying, too.

Can you help us understand just the nature of the fraud?

What did Volkswagen do? Well, it actually goes back to around 2006 or even a few years earlier when Volkswagen decided they wanted to recapture some of their past glory in the United States.

You might remember they were very popular in the heyday of the Beetle, but by the early 2000s,

they had very small market share.

So they were looking for what's our unique selling point and decided that was diesel,

which had been very successful in Europe.

Volkswagen was a leader in sort of civilizing diesel for passenger cars, making it cleaner

and quieter, and they thought they could do that in the United States.

And then when they were getting close to launch, they realized that they were not going to

be able to meet the United States emission standards,

which for nitrogen oxide are stricter than in Europe.

And this was a big problem for them, and they decided that the way to do it was to come up with some software that basically tricked the regulators.

It could tell when the car was being tested and kind of crank up the emissions controls.

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