The boss of the automobile giant Volkswagen, Herbert Diess, will leave the management of the group, Volkswagen announced on Friday July 22. This surprise departure was decided ” from a common agreement ” at a meeting of Volkswagen’s supervisory board, according to a statement. However, nothing foreshadowed his departure. This Friday again, he wanted on LinkedIn a “well deserved summer break” to its employees.
He will be replaced from September by the current chairman of the management board of Porsche, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen group, Oliver Blume.
Period of tension with staff representatives
Herbert Diess had been in the hot seat for months within the giant with twelve brands engaged in a forced march towards the electric and connected car. He had hitherto always saved his head.
“Herbert Diess has played a key role in furthering the transformation of the business during his tenure” at the head of Volkswagen and the eponymous brand, said the chairman of the supervisory board, Hans Dieter Pötsch, in a press release. “He not only steered the company through extremely difficult waters, but he also fundamentally realigned it strategically”he added.
At the end of 2021, Mr. Diess, who came from BMW with a reputation as an intransigent manager, emerged victorious from a period of tension with powerful staff representatives. At the origin of the internal turbulence, the management style and the electrification strategy of the man who took the wheel of Volkswagen in 2018 with the ambition of definitively turning the page on “dieselgate”. Volkswagen had indeed acknowledged in the fall of 2015 that it had equipped 11 million of its diesel vehicles with software capable of concealing emissions sometimes exceeding the authorized standards by up to forty times. Investigations into this scandal had long been slowed by a legal battle before the Court of Justice of the European Union, but the latter finally upheld the illegality of Volkswagen’s software at the end of 2020.
The leader of Porsche at the controls
Since the beginning of the year, Mr. Diess had already had to cede responsibility for operations in China, a strategic market, to another heavyweight in the company, obtaining in compensation the supervision of the Cariad entity, a Volkswagen unit responsible for to code the software at the heart of the electric and connected revolution initiated by the automotive industry.
Ironically, due to the slow progress made by Cariad, Porsche recently decided to break off the partnership with this unit to develop its own IT solutions.
This choice was made by the future replacement for Mr. Diess at the head of Volkswagen. Oliver Blume has been leading Porsche since 2015. He joined the group in 1994, successively occupying management positions within the Audi, Seat and Volkswagen brands. He has been a member of the Volkswagen management board since 2018.