photograph<\/a> of Adolf Hitler, smiling with childlike delight, leaning over a miniature Beetle. Beside him, in a smart civvy suit, SS Colonel Ferdinand Porsche gleefully shows off the prototype. The foundation of Volkswagen is the definitive portrait of a dictator and his sycophants.<\/p>\nOkay, it\u2019s 88 years later and I don\u2019t like hearing about people losing jobs, even at VW. But I do detect a whiff of karma this week. One of the world\u2019s largest automotive empires is in such trouble it plans to axe half its vehicle line-up and sack up to 100,000 workers globally. It\u2019s not restructuring \u2013 it\u2019s capitulation.<\/p>\n
The Nazis never got round to building their \u2018people\u2019s car\u2019; the second world war started and they used the expensively assembled VW hierarchy and factory to make V-1 flying bombs to terrorise Britain instead. VW engineers personally selected skilled Jewish metalworkers from Auschwitz and, by 1944, its production lines were manned by Soviet prisoners, political dissidents and Jewish inmates. They were subjected to a Nazi slogan that horrifically contrasted with VW\u2019s later glib marketing. VW\u2019s factory operated on the concentration camps\u2019 \u2018Vernichtung durch Arbeit\u2019 principle: \u2018extermination through labour\u2019. Thousands were starved, beaten or worked to death in freezing conditions.<\/p>\n
Post-war, the bombed-out VW factory was saved by well-meaning British officers led by Major Ivan Hirst, who restarted Beetle production to help local employment recover. Looking back, it was an extraordinary act of allied charity. Our own car industry went down the pan while a strange, rear-engined bubble car took over the world. We handed the keys of VW back to the Germans when we probably should have just pinched the whole bloody idea.<\/p>\n
But credit where it\u2019s due: what followed was a superb corporate reinvention, fuelled by brilliant engineering and a masterclass in marketing make-over. VW grew into a global colossus by investing up to \u00a35 billion a year becoming the world\u2019s biggest advertising spender.<\/p>\n
The foundation of Volkswagen is the definitive portrait of a dictator and his sycophants<\/p>\n
Visionary advertising companies won awards creating wry, sophisticated lifestyle commercials that wiped away its past stains. In 1987, the world was seduced by a sexy woman storming out on her unfaithful husband, pulling off her pearls, dumping her ring\u2026 but after a tiny hesitation pocketing the keys to their VW Golf. \u2018If only everything in life were as reliable as a Volkswagen,\u2019 we were told with a knowing wink.<\/p>\n
From the cheeky \u2018love-bug\u2019 ads in the 1960s, which implied that buying a Volkswagen was the natural byproduct of an active sex life, to the linguistic seduction of Audi\u2019s guttural \u2018Vorsprung durch Technik\u2019 (\u2018progress through technology\u2019) slogan in 1971, Western middle classes came to accept these standard mass-market vehicles as badges of high-status sophistication.\u00a0<\/p>\n
VW\u2019s wooing of the West was backed by seriously good business. Replacing the obsolete Beetle with the front-wheel-drive Golf hatchback in 1974 created Europe\u2019s undisputed top seller for decades. VW took \u2018platform sharing\u2019 (using the same mechanical chassis and engines for different models) to new extremes. A budget Skoda, youthful Seat and premium Audi could be bolted onto almost identical underpinnings. Production costs were slashed, profits soared.<\/p>\n
Under the notoriously tyrannical leadership of chairman Ferdinand Pi\u00ebch, grandson of the man who had smiled alongside Hitler, from 1993 VW swallowed icons like Bentley and Lamborghini. At its peak, the VW Group was the world\u2019s largest automaker by revenue, a 12-brand empire pulling in more than \u20ac320 billion annually and churning out ten million vehicles a year. It was an industrial superpower second only to Apple on the global manufacturing stage.<\/p>\n
It all shattered spectacularly in 2015 with \u2018Dieselgate\u2019. Unable to meet US emissions standards, VW\u2019s engineers used illegal software to cheat instead. It meant VW cars passed the lab tests but were pumping out toxic gases up to 40 times the legal limit on the road. It was harmful corporate deceit on an industrial scale.<\/p>\n
The scandal forced executive resignations, triggered criminal indictments, permanently shattered that expensively-acquired trustworthy fa\u00e7ade \u2013 and cost the group more than \u20ac30 billion in penalties and legal settlements.<\/p>\n
Desperate to scrub this toxic image, VW gambled its entire future on a multi-billion-pound transition to electric vehicles. For a brief moment, it seemed it might work, but corporate hubris remained. In its rush to match EV rivals, VW fitted flawed infotainment software causing massed product glitches. Meanwhile, agile Chinese brands were winning a brutal price war. The bill for years of strategic miscalculations arrived, setting the stage for today\u2019s collapse. Management is even contemplating building Chinese cars in Germany just to fill factory lines.<\/p>\n
This is a parable for industrial Europe\u2019s decline. Now under the German system of Mitbestimmung, slow-moving committees of local politicians and union bosses sit on the board. They don\u2019t seem to care about building great cars or beating the Chinese; they seem to want to protect their votes, gold-plated employee bonuses and local jobs for local people.<\/p>\n
When run by obsessed tyrants, the company conquered the world; but when run by progressive, focus-grouped committees, it engineered its own demise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I moved on from most of my father\u2019s automotive prejudices. He refused to buy from the Japanese \u2018who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20947],"tags":[1922,5566,5356],"class_list":["post-57651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-volkswagen","tag-hitler","tag-nazi","tag-volkswagen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}