Despite the horrible history, the Porsche family somehow managed to keep hold of the license for Volkswagen design. Even more, thanks to a brilliant advertising campaign, Volkswagen Beetles and vans, decked out with psychedelic colors, became a ubiquitous symbol not of war, but rather of peace, love and understanding: “The transformation of the Volkswagen from Nazi propaganda project to counterculture phenomenon was one of the most spectacular examples of rebranding in the history of marketing.”

Ewing also tells the tangled, intertwined history of Porsche and Volkswagen, and the families who ruled the companies, but it is Porsche’s grandson, Ferdinand Piëch, who is the central character in this book. Piëch, who whether through luck or consummate corporate skill was ousted from his role at Volkswagen just before the world learned about the emissions scandal, was a visionary engineer. “Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Piëch was among a handful of executives who put an unmistakable personal stamp on the companies they ran,” Ewing writes. But he was also a demanding boss whose style created a saying at Volkswagen — “Impossible doesn’t exist.” His rise to power was greased by corporate machinations that would make Machiavelli proud. His fearsome style of management “emboldened subordinates to behave the same way toward their underlings,” Ewing notes. “That is how corporate cultures — the unwritten rules that govern behavior inside a large organization — come into being.”

Ewing makes a compelling case that it was Piëch who “created a company culture that allowed the diesel fraud to fester,” a culture in which there were few clear guidelines about ethical limits and “underlings always suffered the consequences.” During his tenure, there was both an infamous sex scandal and a dramatic case of corporate espionage, both of which led to criminal investigations and neither of which caused any soul searching within the company or any renewed focus on ethics. Not only did Piëch want market leadership, but he “wanted total dominance,” Ewing writes, “and he was prepared to deploy new tactics to achieve it, whatever the consequences.”

A key part of Volkswagen’s grand plan to conquer the world was diesel. In some ways, diesel engines are environmentally friendly — they are more fuel-efficient than gasoline, and produce less carbon dioxide — but they have severe drawbacks. They produce “far more poisonous nitrogen oxides than gasoline cars did, as well as very fine, carcinogenic soot particles.” This was a problem in the United States, particularly because of strict emissions laws mandated by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and its subsequent iterations. And it was an engineering problem at Volkswagen, because efforts to reduce the emissions led inevitably to trade-offs with fuel economy, as well as with the performance and style of the car.

Since Volkswagen didn’t want to make those trade-offs — doing so might affect its goal to become the world’s largest automaker — the company’s engineers arrived at a technical impasse. The answer? To cheat, of course, by using a defeat device. “There was a tolerance for breaking the rules and a lack of checks and balances. … Employees who had reservations about the illegal software — and there were some — had no place to turn,” Ewing writes. And “higher-ups overruled engineers who objected to the illegal software.”