Volkswagen Group’s Piech Dies at 82

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Ferdinand Piech, a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, former Chairman and CEO of Volkswagen Group and father of the legendary Porsche 917 race car, has died in Bavaria, Sunday, August 25, 2019. He was 82.

Known for his dominating leadership style, Piech helped transform the group into the world’s largest auto manufacturer, adding nameplates Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti and Porsche into the fold. Other brands included VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat, heavy truck builders MAN and Scania, and other brands including motorcycle manufacturer Ducati.

With his grandfather’s name on the building, Porsche, through mergers and acquisitions of blue-chip brands, turned Volkswagen Group into the largest automaker in Europe, and more recently into the largest automaker in the world. To this day, the Piech and Porsche families control a majority stake in the company.

Piech became Volkswagen CEO in 1993, amidst a period of deep losses for the automaker. During his tenure as CEO, he initiated a significant house cleaning that replaced most of the board of management, reduced material costs and reconfigured the workweek schedules, along with a complete plan to overhaul the product lineup. His efforts converted a $1.1 billion loss into a nearly $2.9-billion profit.

Seemingly always focused on cars, Piech was quoted in an Automotive News article that he always saw himself as a product person, and “relied on gut instinct for market demand. Business and politics never distracted me from the core of our mission: to develop and make attractive cars.”

Piech’s most significant achievement at VW was acquiring the Porsche brand in 2012. It was at at that moment that he turned the tables on his cousin Wolfgang Porsche, who was pushing for the sports car company to buy VW Group four years earlier.

The combination of Porsche with Volkswagen Group brought together two manufacturers that trace their origins to Piech’s grandfather, Ferdinand Porsche, who developed the original VW Beetle under a contract with Germany’s Nazi regime in 1934.

Piech eventually sold his shares in the company to the family and retreated from the business. Herbert Diess, the Volkswagen CEO, described Piech as a brave, forceful and technically brilliant leader. “Most of all, Ferdinand Piech brought perfection and attention to detail to automotive production and into Volkswagen’s DNA,” Diess said.

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