Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess Is Out, Porsche CEO to Take Over
Diess’s reign at VW has been anything but smooth. And now it’s over.
Herbert Diess, Volkswagen's CEO, has been replaced by Porsche CEO Oliver Blume, the company announced today. The changeover will occur on September 1, 2022, capping a tumultuous ar term that saw serious disputes between Diess and the company's European labor leadership, which some feel contributed to the decline in Volkswagen's share value from its recent highs last year, asReutersreports.
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Diess himself took over the company from Matthais Müller, who had taken over the CEO position in the wake of Dieselgate and the resignation of then-CEO Martin Winterkorn. It was hoped that Diess would be the sort of leader the company would need to regain its position in the market after the Dieselgate mess.
Of late, Volkswagen's challenges have been to stay ahead in the EV race in Europe, and some challenges—particularly, asReutersnotes, in delivering effective next-generation vehicle software architecture on time and on budget—are weighing on the outlook. That software development arm is called CARAID, and it's intended to bring both automotive operating system software (VW.OS) and cloud-based AI system (VW.AC) to new Volkswagen Group products "in a few years." It is up to Blume now to get the software situation back on track.
Blume, by the way, also rose to his previous position during the Dieselgate shakeup. He's been with Volkswagen Group since 1994, and chairman of Porsche's Board of Management since 2015. Volkswagen's supervisory board pointed to a record of sound "financial, technological, and cultural" management as a reason for his elevation.
Blume will not give up his role heading Porsche as of yet, and may even see the brand through its "possible" IPO, as the company notes. Whether Blume intends to permanently control Volkswagen and Porsche from the same role, or allow someone else to fill the position at Porsche, remains to be seen.
Like a lot of the other staffers here, Alex Kierstein took the hard way to get to car writing. Although he always loved cars, he wasn’t sure a career in automotive media could possibly pan out. So, after an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Washington, he headed to law school. To be clear, it sucked. After a lot of false starts, and with little else to lose, he got a job at Turn 10 Studios supporting the Forza 4 and Forza Horizon 1 launches. The friendships made there led to a job at a major automotive publication in Michigan, and after a few years to MotorTrend. He lives in the Seattle area with a small but scruffy fleet of great vehicles, including a V-8 4Runner and a C5 Corvette, and he also dabbles in scruffy vintage watches and film cameras.
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