Ferdinand Piëch

Ferdinand Piëch
Born	Ferdinand Karl Piëch 1937-04-1717 April 1937 Vienna, Austria
Died	2019-08-2525 August 2019(aged 82) Rosenheim, Bavaria, Germany
Nationality	Austrian
Education	Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz ETH Zurich (Dipl.-Ing., mechanical engineering, 1962)
Alma mater	ETH Zurich
Occupation	Automotive engineer, business executive
Years active	1963-2017
Employer	Porsche (1963-1972) Audi (1972-1993) Volkswagen Group (1993-2015)
Title	Chairman of the board of management, Volkswagen AG
Term	1993-2002 (management board) 2002-2015 (supervisory board)
Predecessor	Carl Hahn
Successor	Bernd Pischetsrieder
Known for	Chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen Group Development of the Porsche 917, Audi Quattro and Bugatti Veyron Car Executive of the Century (1999)
Spouse	Corina von Planta Marlene Porsche Ursula Piëch (m. 1984)
Children	13
Parents	Anton Piëch Louise Piëch
Relatives	Ferdinand Porsche (grandfather) Ferry Porsche (uncle) Wolfgang Porsche (cousin)

Ferdinand Karl Piëch (17 April 1937 - 25 August 2019) was an Austrian engineer and business executive who served as chairman of the board of management of the Volkswagen Group from 1993 to 2002 and as chairman of its supervisory board from 2002 to 2015. A grandson of the automotive designer Ferdinand Porsche, he spent more than five decades in the German and Austrian motor industry and is generally regarded as one of the most consequential automotive executives of the twentieth century.

Piëch trained as a mechanical engineer at ETH Zurich and began his career at Porsche in 1963, where he directed the racing programme that produced the Porsche 917 and delivered the company its first overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Moving to Audi in 1972, he spent two decades turning a marginal middle-market brand into a credible premium competitor to Mercedes-Benz and BMW, introducing the first series-production five-cylinder petrol engine, the aerodynamically optimised Audi 100, the four-wheel-drive Audi Quattro and the turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine marketed as TDI.

He took over a loss-making Volkswagen AG in 1993 and restored it to profitability within two years through an aggressive cost and procurement programme, then assembled a multi-brand group that eventually spanned Volkswagen, Audi, Škoda, SEAT, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Ducati, Scania and MAN. His insistence on manufacturing tolerances, his willingness to fund technically extreme projects such as the Bugatti Veyron regardless of their commercial return, and his readiness to remove senior executives who displeased him made him both admired and feared within the industry. In 1999 the Global Automotive Elections Foundation named him Car Executive of the Century, and in 2014 he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

Piëch's legacy is contested. Supporters credit him with rescuing Volkswagen from near-insolvency and building Europe's largest carmaker. Critics, including the former General Motors and Chrysler executive Bob Lutz, argue that the climate of fear he established at Wolfsburg contributed to the Volkswagen emissions scandal that broke in September 2015, four months after he left the company.

Early life and family background

The Porsche and Piëch families

Ferdinand Karl Piëch was born in Vienna on 17 April 1937, the third child of Anton Piëch, a Viennese lawyer, and Louise Piëch, the daughter of the automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche. The family occupied an unusual position in European industry. His grandfather had designed the Auto Union Grand Prix racing cars of the 1930s, the Volkswagen Beetle and, during the Second World War, military vehicles for the German armaments programme. His father Anton served as commercial director of the Volkswagen plant at Fallersleben, later Wolfsburg, during the war years, a period for which both Anton Piëch and Ferdinand Porsche were subsequently detained by French authorities.

The post-war settlement of the Porsche estate left the Porsche and Piëch branches of the family as joint owners of the Porsche company, an arrangement that would shape Piëch's entire career and produce recurrent tension between the two sides. His mother Louise ran the Austrian general importer for Volkswagen and Porsche in Salzburg, a highly profitable distribution business that gave the Piëch branch an independent commercial base.

Piëch had three siblings. His elder brother Ernst Piëch, born in 1929, married a daughter of Heinrich Nordhoff, the executive who rebuilt Volkswagen after the war and served as its first post-war chief executive. His sister Louise Daxer-Piëch, who died in 2006, worked in management at the Salzburg importer. His younger brother Hans-Michel Piëch, born in 1942, became a lawyer in Vienna and later sat alongside Ferdinand on the supervisory boards of Porsche and Volkswagen.

Education

Piëch was dyslexic, a condition that made conventional schooling difficult and that he discussed publicly only later in life. From 1952 to 1958 he attended the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, a boarding school in the Engadine valley in Switzerland.

He then enrolled at the ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal technical university, where he studied mechanical engineering. He graduated in 1962 with a diploma thesis on the design of a Formula One engine, an early indication of the direction his career would take. The choice of a racing engine as an academic subject was characteristic: throughout his working life Piëch treated motorsport not as marketing but as the most demanding available test of engineering.

Career

Porsche, 1963-1972

Piëch joined Porsche in 1963, at the age of 26, under the direction of his uncle Ferry Porsche. He was assigned to engine testing and moved quickly into development. From 1965 he headed the development department, and in 1971 he became technical director of the company.

Racing programme

Piëch's most visible work at Porsche was in sports car racing. He was involved in the development of the Porsche 906 and the models that followed it, and he introduced a series of engineering and organisational changes that transformed the company's competitive position. Beginning with the 1967 Porsche 907, he moved the driver's seat in the two-seat racing cars from the left side to the right, on the reasoning that the majority of circuits ran clockwise and that the change gave a measurable advantage.

The decision that defined the period came in 1968. Porsche had until then concentrated on 2,000 cc cars intended to share components with its road models. The FIA sporting authority permitted 5,000 cc engines in the Group 4 sports car category provided that a manufacturer built a minimum of twenty-five identical cars, against a 3,000 cc limit for prototypes built in smaller numbers. Piëch committed Porsche to building the twenty-five cars required, an outlay that was very large relative to the size of the company and that caught the rule makers and competitors unprepared. The result was the Porsche 917.

The scale of the commitment can be measured against the behaviour of Porsche's rivals. Enzo Ferrari sold his company to Fiat before undertaking a comparable investment. The 917 went on to give Porsche overall victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1970 and 1971, the first in the company's history, and in turbocharged Can-Am form the 917/30 produced power outputs that remained exceptional decades later.

Piëch also began development of a sixteen-cylinder engine for the Can-Am series, a project with an evident family precedent in his grandfather's supercharged sixteen-cylinder Auto Union engines of the 1930s. The programme was not completed, because a turbocharged version of the existing twelve-cylinder engine proved simpler, more powerful and easier to develop. Piëch returned to the sixteen-cylinder configuration three decades later at Volkswagen.

The EA 266 and departure

Piëch led the development of the Volkswagen EA 266, a mid-engined design intended as the successor to the Beetle, which Porsche developed on contract for Volkswagen. The project was completed in 1971, but Volkswagen's management judged the development costs and projected manufacturing economics unacceptable and cancelled it. The car never left the prototype stage, and all forty-eight prototypes were destroyed shortly afterwards. Volkswagen instead proceeded with the front-wheel-drive, water-cooled Golf.

In early 1972 the extended Porsche family adopted a governance rule that no member of the Porsche or Piëch families could hold an executive management position in the company. The rule was intended to prevent conflict among the many family shareholders. Its effect was to end Piëch's executive career at Porsche. Even Ferry Porsche, the founder's son, thereafter held only a supervisory board seat, following the conversion of the company from a limited partnership into a private company limited by shares.

Piëch left Porsche in 1972. He founded an engineering consultancy in Stuttgart, where among other work he contributed to the development of the Mercedes-Benz OM617 five-cylinder diesel engine.

Audi, 1972-1993

In August 1972 Piëch joined Audi NSU Auto Union in Ingolstadt as head of the special projects department. Audi at that time was a subsidiary of Volkswagen with a modest reputation, positioned above Volkswagen but well below Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the German market. Piëch spent twenty-one years there and rebuilt the brand around technology.

He became manager of technological engineering in 1975, deputy chairman of the board in 1983, and chairman of the board of management in 1988.

Engineering programmes

Piëch was directly responsible for the design concepts behind a series of Audi models through the 1970s and 1980s, including the Audi 80, the Audi 100 and the Audi V8. In 1977 the Audi 100 5E introduced the world's first series-production five-cylinder petrol engine, a configuration that gave the car greater refinement than a four-cylinder without the length and weight penalty of a six.

The third-generation Audi 100 of 1982 was developed around aerodynamic efficiency, achieving a drag coefficient of 0.30, then the lowest of any mass-produced saloon. Piëch personally supervised the aerodynamic development and kept the results confidential even from senior Audi engineers, on the grounds that the details would otherwise reach competitors before launch.

The programme with the largest long-term consequence began as a rallying project. Piëch initiated development of a car for the World Rally Championship built around permanent four-wheel drive, a system previously associated with off-road and military vehicles rather than performance cars. The resulting Audi Quattro, launched in 1980, won the manufacturers' championship in 1982 and 1984 and made four-wheel drive a mainstream feature of high-performance road cars. The quattro name became the central element of Audi's technical identity.

The turbocharged direct-injection diesel engine marketed as TDI was also developed under Piëch's leadership. The engine transformed the market position of diesel passenger cars in Europe, combining fuel economy with performance that had not previously been available, and it became the foundation of Volkswagen Group's powertrain strategy for the next quarter century. It was also the engine family at the centre of the emissions scandal two decades later.

The slogan Audi adopted in this period, Vorsprung durch Technik, translated as progress through technology, was a direct statement of Piëch's conviction that engineering advantage was the answer to competitive problems.

Volkswagen Group, 1993-2015

Appointment and crisis

In 1993 Piëch moved to the parent company, becoming chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen AG in succession to Carl Hahn. The company he inherited was close to insolvency. Volkswagen was losing money heavily, its cost base was uncompetitive, its quality reputation had deteriorated, and its position in North America had collapsed.

Piëch addressed the crisis on three fronts: production and procurement costs, product quality, and the range of businesses the group operated in.

Cost reduction and the López affair

In 1993 Piëch recruited José Ignacio López de Arriortúa from General Motors, together with seven of his colleagues, to head a newly created board division for production optimisation and procurement. López had a reputation for extracting price concessions from component suppliers by aggressive renegotiation of existing contracts. Combined with the 28-hour working week negotiated by the human resources director Peter Hartz, which reduced labour costs while avoiding mass redundancies, the measures cut Volkswagen's production costs substantially and returned the group to profit within Piëch's first years in office.

The recruitment produced a serious legal dispute. General Motors and its German subsidiary Opel alleged that López and his colleagues had taken confidential documents with them to Volkswagen. The affair generated criminal investigations in Germany and a civil action in the United States, and it was settled in 1997 when Volkswagen agreed to pay General Motors 100 million United States dollars and to purchase one billion dollars of GM parts over seven years. López left Volkswagen in 1996.

North America

Volkswagen's position in the United States had eroded through the late 1970s and 1980s. Japanese competitors had taken share, quality control was poor, and the Americanised Volkswagen Rabbit produced at the Westmoreland assembly plant in Pennsylvania damaged the goodwill built up by the Beetle. Audi suffered separately from reports that the Audi 100, sold in North America as the 5000, was subject to unintended acceleration, allegations that led to hundreds of reported accidents and several deaths and that devastated the brand's American sales even though subsequent investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributed the incidents largely to pedal misapplication. A weak United States dollar raised the effective price of German cars. After closing Westmoreland, Volkswagen considered withdrawing from North America entirely in the early 1990s.

Piëch reversed the decision. He approved production of the Volkswagen New Beetle, a retro-styled car built on the Golf platform that recovered the emotional associations of the original, and oversaw the launch of substantially improved Golf Mk4, Jetta Mk4 and Passat B5 models. Volkswagen sales in the United States rose from fewer than 50,000 cars in 1993 to 355,648 in 2001. Audi recovered in parallel following the introduction of the A4, the redesigned A6 and the TT: American sales rose from 12,117 cars in 1991 to 85,726 in 2002.

Quality and the pursuit of tolerances

Piëch's approach to quality was personal and highly specific. He concentrated on panel gaps, on the grounds that consistently narrow gaps are achievable only with a rigid body structure and disciplined manufacturing, and therefore serve as a visible proxy for underlying build quality. The attention earned him the German nickname Spaltmaß-Ferdl, roughly Gap Ferdl.

The methods were blunt. Bob Lutz recounted a conversation with Piëch at the Frankfurt Motor Show in the early 1990s in which he complimented Volkswagen on the fit and finish of its new models. According to Lutz, Piëch replied that he had assembled Volkswagen's senior body engineers in his office and told them that they would all be dismissed if every Volkswagen vehicle did not achieve body tolerances of three millimetres within six weeks.

Structural decisions followed the same logic. The B-pillar of the Golf Mk4 was reinforced and partly hand-finished so that the car would perform no worse than the Mercedes-Benz A-Class in side-impact testing.

Building the multi-brand group

Piëch assembled the brand portfolio that defines the modern Volkswagen Group. He arranged the marques into a hierarchy modelled on the structure Alfred P. Sloan created at General Motors, with each brand assigned a distinct market position while sharing platforms, components and engineering resources. Piëch's stated aim was to raise the standing of each brand by giving it access to Volkswagen's engineering and development capability.

Audi acquired Lamborghini in 1998. Volkswagen established Bugatti Automobiles SAS in the same period, reviving a dormant French marque.

The acquisition of Rolls-Royce and Bentley in 1998 was the most contentious episode. Volkswagen outbid BMW for Vickers, the owner of the two brands, and obtained the Crewe factory, the car designs, and trademarks including the Spirit of Ecstasy mascot and the Rolls-Royce radiator grille shape. It did not obtain the right to use the Rolls-Royce name and badge, which were controlled separately by Rolls-Royce Holdings, the aero-engine company, and which BMW licensed for a comparatively small sum. After negotiation, Volkswagen sold the Spirit of Ecstasy and grille trademarks to BMW, and BMW went on to launch Rolls-Royce Motor Cars as a separate business from 2003. Piëch subsequently maintained that Bentley had always been his primary interest, noting that Bentley outsold Rolls-Royce by roughly two to one, but the outcome was widely reported at the time as a significant failure of due diligence.

In commercial vehicles, Volkswagen acquired the Swedish truck maker Scania, where Piëch was appointed chairman in 2000, and the German manufacturer MAN. The group also acquired the Italdesign Giugiaro design studio. In 2012 Volkswagen acquired the motorcycle manufacturer Ducati, entering the motorcycle market for the first time.

Technical showpieces: the Veyron and the Phaeton

Two projects illustrate Piëch's willingness to subordinate commercial return to engineering ambition.

The Bugatti Veyron, launched in 2005, was specified by Piëch to produce 1,001 metric horsepower, roughly 736 kilowatts, and to exceed 400 kilometres per hour while remaining fully road legal and usable. The car used a quad-turbocharged 8.0-litre W16 engine, returning to the sixteen-cylinder configuration he had abandoned at Porsche in the early 1970s. It became, as of 2012, the fastest, most powerful and most expensive road-legal production car built. Volkswagen was estimated to lose in the region of six million dollars on every Veyron sold.

The Volkswagen Phaeton, launched in 2002, applied the same reasoning to a luxury saloon. Piëch specified that the car should be capable of sustaining 300 kilometres per hour with an exterior temperature of 50 degrees Celsius while maintaining a cabin temperature of 22 degrees Celsius. It was built in a purpose-constructed glass-walled factory in Dresden. Sold under the Volkswagen badge, it failed commercially against established luxury brands: only about 3,500 were sold in North America between 2004 and the withdrawal of the model from that market in 2006. Volkswagen was estimated to lose roughly 40,000 dollars on each car.

Both projects proved Volkswagen's technical capability and both were persistent loss leaders. That Piëch was able to authorise them, and to retain his position while doing so, was itself a measure of his standing within the company.

Transition to the supervisory board

Piëch stepped down as chairman of the board of management in 2002, at the mandatory retirement age of 65, and moved directly to the chairmanship of the supervisory board, the body responsible for appointing and overseeing the management board. He was succeeded as chief executive by Bernd Pischetsrieder, the former head of BMW.

The move gave Piëch continued control over Volkswagen for a further thirteen years. German corporate governance codes discourage a departing chief executive from moving immediately to the chair of the supervisory board precisely because of the risk that the former executive continues to run the company. In Piëch's case that is broadly what occurred.

The Porsche and Volkswagen takeover battle

Between 2005 and 2009 the ownership relationship between Porsche and Volkswagen was inverted twice, in an episode that combined family rivalry with one of the most consequential episodes of market disruption in German corporate history.

Porsche SE, led by chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking and finance director Holger Härter, began building a stake in Volkswagen in 2005 with the stated aim of protecting Volkswagen from a hostile bidder. The stake grew steadily. In October 2008 Porsche disclosed that it held shares and options equivalent to roughly 74 percent of Volkswagen's ordinary shares, with the state of Lower Saxony holding a further 20 percent. Because so little stock remained available, investors who had sold Volkswagen shares short were forced to buy at almost any price. Volkswagen's share price rose sharply enough that the company briefly became, on paper, the most valuable listed company in the world.

The strategy depended on debt. Porsche had borrowed heavily to finance the position, and when credit markets closed during the financial crisis the company was unable to refinance. By 2009 Porsche was carrying obligations it could not service, and the takeover collapsed.

Piëch, who sat on both sides of the family shareholding, supported the reversal. Wiedeking was removed in July 2009. Volkswagen then acquired the Porsche automotive business, in a transaction completed in stages and valued at approximately 11.3 billion dollars in cash for the second tranche, integrating Porsche as the tenth brand of the Volkswagen Group in 2012. The holding company Porsche Automobil Holding SE, controlled by the Porsche and Piëch families, remained the majority holder of Volkswagen's voting shares.

German prosecutors later charged Wiedeking and Härter with market manipulation, alleging that Porsche had publicly denied an intention to raise its stake to 75 percent while having already resolved to do so. Both were acquitted in 2016.

The outcome left the family in control of Volkswagen and left Piëch as the dominant figure in the enlarged group. It also entrenched the antagonism between the Porsche and Piëch branches of the family, whose members held the decisive votes.

Departure from Volkswagen

Piëch's exit came suddenly and was of his own making. In early April 2015 the German press quoted him as saying that he was "at a distance" from Martin Winterkorn, the chief executive he had himself installed in 2007 and long treated as his protégé. The remark was understood across the industry as an instruction to the supervisory board to remove Winterkorn.

The board did not comply. At a meeting of the supervisory board's steering committee, Piëch was isolated in a five-to-one vote. The labour representatives, who hold half the seats on a German supervisory board under codetermination law, the state of Lower Saxony, and his own cousin Wolfgang Porsche all supported Winterkorn. It was the first time in more than two decades that Piëch had been defeated on a personnel question at Volkswagen.

On 25 April 2015 Piëch resigned with immediate effect from the chairmanship of the supervisory board and from all his mandates within the Volkswagen Group. His wife Ursula Piëch, who also sat on the supervisory board, resigned at the same time.

Five months later, in September 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of violation disclosing that Volkswagen had installed defeat device software in diesel engines to produce compliant results during emissions testing. Winterkorn resigned within days.

In 2017 Piëch sold the majority of his ordinary shares in Porsche Automobil Holding SE to other members of the Porsche and Piëch families and resigned from that company's supervisory board, ending his formal involvement in the industry.

Management style

Piëch's methods were widely documented and widely criticised, and they are inseparable from any account of his results.

He was, by training and by temperament, a product engineer who happened to occupy chief executive positions. He involved himself directly in vehicle development to a degree unusual at his level, personally supervising aerodynamic work at Audi, riding with motoring journalists during press launches to hear their criticisms at first hand, and specifying performance targets for individual models. The Car and Driver writer John Phillips recounted that Piëch rode with him during the 1997 launch of the New Beetle and asked directly how the chassis and driving dynamics could be improved. On another occasion Piëch required a reviewer for Automobile to take a Phaeton to its maximum speed while Piëch sat in the rear seat.

He was also, by consistent report, difficult to be near. Automotive News described him as "a world-class eccentric but a figure of transcendent importance in the history of cars and car companies" and noted that many of his peers said they could not hold an ordinary conversation with him, and that discussions were punctuated by long unexplained silences. Piëch acknowledged that he sometimes struggled to relate to other people or to read their feelings.

Carl Hahn, his predecessor as Volkswagen chief executive, regarded Piëch's social manner as a liability and attempted to position him as a technocrat kept away from public occasions. Hahn was reportedly troubled by Piëch's conduct during a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where a Shinto priest showing a collection of antique swords was told by Piëch that one of them was a fake. Hahn subsequently presented the Audi Avus quattro concept car himself at the 1991 Tokyo Motor Show and excluded Piëch from the presentation, which angered Piëch given his personal involvement in the car.

His approach to subordinates was the most criticised element of his record. Piëch stated that he dismissed any subordinate who made the same mistake twice. Bob Lutz characterised the result as "a reign of terror and a culture where performance was driven by fear and intimidation", adding that the style produces short-term results but is "extremely dangerous", and comparing it to the behaviour of political dictators who destroy the countries they govern. Lutz described Piëch as a "mad genius" whom he respected but would never work for. Wired described him as "Machiavellian" and "an autocrat's autocrat". The Guardian noted his ability to outmanoeuvre rivals by stoking internal conflicts, including by siding with Volkswagen's labour leaders against his own chief executives.

The assessments of his significance are correspondingly high. Lutz also called him "one of the most successful leaders in the automotive business" and "the greatest living product guy" in the industry. The Guardian concluded in its obituary that "his stewardship of VW has been indisputably successful" and that he would "go down in history as an automotive legend, in the same class as Gottlieb Daimler, Henry Ford and Kiichiro Toyoda."

Controversies and criticism

Personnel policy

Piëch was responsible for the removal of a large number of senior managers and board members at both Volkswagen and Audi, in several cases after very short tenures.

Franz-Josef Kortüm was dismissed as head of Audi in 1993 after thirteen months, on the grounds that Piëch was dissatisfied with sales. His successor Herbert Demel left the position after repeated conflicts with Piëch. Demel's successor Franz-Josef Paefgen was dismissed in 2001 after Piëch accused him of allowing stagnation at Audi.

The most consequential case was Bernd Pischetsrieder, whom Piëch had selected as his own successor as chief executive in 2002. In February 2006 Piëch publicly questioned whether Pischetsrieder retained the support of the employee representatives on the supervisory board. Pischetsrieder's contract was nonetheless extended in May 2006, but the supervisory board removed him from the management board with effect from 31 December 2006. He was replaced by Martin Winterkorn, whom Piëch would in turn attempt to remove in 2015.

Piëch was also instrumental in the removal of the Porsche chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking in 2009 following the collapse of the Porsche takeover attempt.

Loss-making projects

The Bugatti Veyron and the Volkswagen Phaeton were both developed at very large expense and both lost money on every unit sold, at estimated rates of approximately six million dollars per Veyron and 40,000 dollars per Phaeton. Analysts questioned at the time whether a listed company should fund projects on that basis. Wired observed that Piëch approved one of the largest deliberate automotive losses in history well past normal retirement age, kept his position, and was treated as a hero for it.

The Suzuki partnership

In 2009 Volkswagen acquired a 19.9 percent stake in Suzuki under a partnership intended to give Volkswagen access to the Indian small-car market and Suzuki access to Volkswagen technology. The relationship broke down within two years, with Suzuki objecting to Volkswagen's characterisation of it as an associate company subject to Volkswagen's influence. Suzuki sought to terminate the agreement, and after Piëch's departure from power the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce ruled in Suzuki's favour, allowing the capital tie-up to be dissolved by September 2015. Piëch's conduct during the dispute, which Suzuki's leadership regarded as an attempt at a hostile takeover accompanied by threats to its management, was central to the breakdown.

The emissions scandal

The Volkswagen emissions scandal, disclosed by United States regulators in September 2015, involved software fitted to diesel engines that detected test conditions and reduced nitrogen oxide emissions accordingly, while allowing far higher emissions in normal driving. The affair ultimately cost Volkswagen more than 30 billion euros in fines, settlements and buybacks and led to criminal convictions of several executives.

Piëch's own role remains unclear, particularly the question of when he first became aware of the manipulation. He stated that he had informed members of the supervisory board, including the Minister-President of Lower Saxony Stephan Weil and the works council chairman Bernd Osterloh, about discrepancies in the engine software at an early stage. Those accounts were disputed. In February 2017 Piëch refused to give evidence to the Bundestag committee of inquiry into the affair.

A broader line of criticism holds Piëch responsible not for specific knowledge but for the conditions that made the manipulation possible. Bob Lutz, CNBC and the documentary series Dirty Money have each argued that the scandal was a product of the corporate culture Piëch installed: extremely demanding targets, an unwillingness to accept that a target might be technically unattainable, and severe consequences for managers who reported failure. The specific target at issue, an engine that would meet United States nitrogen oxide limits without the cost and packaging penalty of urea injection, was of that kind.

Engineering legacy

Piëch's direct contributions to vehicle engineering are unusual for someone who reached chief executive level. He was involved in the development of the Porsche 911 and the Porsche 917, initiated the Audi Quattro and its four-wheel-drive system, introduced the first series-production five-cylinder petrol engine, oversaw the development of the TDI diesel engine, and specified the Bugatti Veyron.

The four-wheel-drive system pioneered on the Quattro became standard across the performance segment. The TDI engine family reshaped the European car market, at one point accounting for more than half of new car sales in several major European countries, before the emissions scandal and subsequent regulatory tightening reversed the trend. The multi-brand platform-sharing architecture he built at Volkswagen, in which distinct marques at different price points share underlying engineering, became the standard operating model for large automotive groups.

Personal life

Piëch had thirteen children by four different women, an arrangement that attracted persistent attention in the German press and complicated the already intricate question of family succession within the Porsche and Piëch shareholding.

His first marriage was to Corina von Planta. He subsequently had a relationship with Marlene Porsche, the former wife of his cousin Gerd Porsche, which caused lasting friction within the family. In 1984 he married Ursula Plasser, who had been employed as a governess to his children; as Ursula Piëch she later joined the supervisory board of Volkswagen AG and resigned alongside him in 2015. The couple lived in Salzburg in his later years.

One of his sons, Toni Piëch, founded the electric vehicle company Piëch Automotive. Piëch maintained a substantial private car collection that included two Bugatti Veyrons, which he and his wife drove regularly.

Death

Piëch collapsed on 25 August 2019 while having dinner with his wife in Aschau im Chiemgau, near Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead shortly afterwards, at the age of 82. No specific cause of death was released.

Two Volkswagen Group brands commemorated him in the names of subsequent vehicles. Lamborghini unveiled the Sián FKP 37 in September 2019, the designation combining his initials with his year of birth. Bugatti presented the F.K.P. Hommage in January 2026, also incorporating his initials.

Awards and honours

• 1984: Honorary doctorate, Vienna University of Technology
• 1999: Honorary doctorate, ETH Zurich
• 1999: Car Executive of the Century, Global Automotive Elections Foundation
• 2001: Honorary citizen of Ingolstadt
• 2002: Honorary citizen of Wolfsburg
• 2002: Wilhelm Exner Medal
• 2003: Grashof Medal, Association of German Engineers
• 2011: Auto Star of the Decade, Automobilwoche
• 2011: Named the most important manager since 1971 by Manager Magazin
• 2012: Honorary Professor of Automotive Engineering, West Saxon University of Applied Sciences of Zwickau
• 2014: Honorary citizen of Braunschweig
• 2014: Honorary Senator, Vienna University of Technology
• 2014: Inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame

External links

• Volkswagen Group official website
• Automotive Hall of Fame