The Last Car Guy

Ferdinand Piëch, who died last week, was perhaps the greatest automotive engineer and automobile executive of the last fifty years. The grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the Volkswagen Beetle, and the nephew of Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche (known as "Ferry" Porsche), who spearheaded the postwar growth of the Porsche sports-car company, he was born for a career in designing and selling cars, and Piëch's taste in cars was quite simple - he only wanted to make the best cars.

Piëch literally began his career in the family business, engineering and designing Porsche race cars that won numerous runs of the 24-hour LeMans race.  He'd come to the company with valuable experience; as a college student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he studied engineering, he had spent enormous amounts of time adding more power to his own Porsche; he actually took out the heater to make room for more power and drove five hundred kilometers from his family estate in Austria to Zurich, where he went to school, in the bitter cold. Always committed to making improvements on a car design, Piëch was a natural at his family's company, and when he went to Volkswagen's Audi division, he became primarily responsible for turning the marque from an dowdy upper-middle-class brand into a premium brand on the same scale as Mercedes-Benz.  He took that same drive and determination to the chairmanship of Volkswagen AG in 1993, where he increased the market share of Europe's largest automaker and cut costs to bring expenses more in line with the Japanese.  He also added Bentley and Lamborghini to VW's brand empire and brought back the French supercar marque Bugatti. 

Piëch's greatest achievement, though, was nursing VW back to health in North America, where the Japanese had all but decimated the European share of the U.S. and Canadian import market, leaving Volkswagen as the only affordable European car brand in both countries and with a pathetic 0.05 percent U.S. market share.  (Volkswagen sold 3.3 million cars worldwide in 1993 but only sold 49,000 cars in the United States that year - 0.01 percent of its global sales.)  Piëch responded in North America with great products like the Mark 5 Passat sedan and wagon and superb fourth-generation remakes of the Golf and the Jetta.  But it was his championing of the New Beetle, which turned out to be a core product for VW to organize itself around, that saved the day for Volkswagen in the New World.  Piëch, who left the chairmanship in 2002 but remained the head of the Volkswagen advisory board until 2015, proved his point that change comes from great product, not the other way around.  

Piëch's legacy isn't sterling, however.  He was an autocratic manager and a brutal, demanding boss who subscribed to no method other than his own and would not accept anyone who challenged his authority.  This put pressure on VW engineers to meet impossible demands, and many cite Piëch's inflexibility as a reason that the company resorted to cheating on diesel engine emissions.  Piëch had also hired GM-Europe executive José Ignacio López for his cost-cutting expertise, but López had arrived at Volkswagen with a cache full of GM secrets that resulted in a mess of lawsuits and charges against Volkswagen, much to Piëch's embarrassment.  And then there was the Phaeton, that gorgeous luxury sport sedan that had the finest craftsmanship an engineering an Audi could have . . . except that Piëch wanted to market it as a Volkswagen.  It suggested what would happen if General Motors made the finest car possible that could bear the Cadillac name and marketing it as a Chevrolet.  And to be honest, a lot of his cost-cutting measures and his efforts to improve quality haven't gone as well as he might have hoped.  

On balance, though, Piëch's triumphs outweigh his failures.  He was one of the last real automotive geniuses in the car business, most likely the last, a man who, as journalist David Kiley once wrote, had motor oil and axle grease in his veins.  Now that Piëch's veins have run cold, we'll never see another auto kingpin like him.  RIP.