Dear reader,
Whether there will be an agreement between the board of directors and employee representatives at Volkswagen before Christmas is still unclear after a heated works meeting in Wolfsburg on Wednesday. As a former CEO, Herbert Diess (66) also played his part in the situation at VW. He doesn’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s why he doesn’t get bored, as our topics of the week show:
Herbert Diess (66) no longer uses his remarkable reach on LinkedIn (almost 300,000 followers!) to post videos of surfing in front of the VW factory in Wolfsburg or disappointed posts from the VW ID.3 about uninviting Ionity charging locations. Diess’ new favorite motto for posts is #zerozero instead. Diess has headed The Mobility House’s board of directors since the beginning of the year. One of the start-up’s goals: Electric cars should become mobile storage devices, so that their owners can drive not only CO₂-neutrally, but also cost-neutrally. Just Zerozero. But there is a problem: the idea still fails because of the legal framework. Diess therefore has to clean up: almost a third of the jobs at The Mobility House are gone. And there are also problems in management.
Heads: Carlos Tavares ++ Patrick Koller ++ Nicolas Peter ++ Geoffrey Bouquot ++ Karl-Thomas Neumann
Imelda Labbé (57) was sales director of VW Passenger Cars until July 2024. In the future, she will lobby for Wolfsburg’s competitors such as Hyundai and Renault: Labbé was elected President of the Association of International Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (VDIK) on Wednesday. When she took office she presented their prognosis
for the car year 2025 in Germany. Overall, Labbé expects a slight increase in new registrations, and there will probably be rapid progress in electric cars: 580,000 new electric vehicles are expected due to stricter CO₂ regulations, around 200,000 more than this year and also more than in 2023, when there was still government funding. If the forecast comes true, the electric market share in this country would be 20 percent next year.
Deep Drive: Agency Fear Podcast
Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Stellantis – more or less the entire automotive industry set out a few years ago to crack an iron principle: The manufacturer builds, the dealer sells. With the help of so-called agency sales, corporations want to gain greater control of sales and raise billions. The initial euphoria was recently followed by more and more frustration, as can be seen at Volkswagen, among others, where the path they had just taken is now completely in question again. How did this come about and what happens next? You can find out in our podcast “The Topic”.
Yesterday it was great, today it’s a flop: This can’t just happen to Carlos Tavares (66). The latest quarterly balance sheet with a profit of $3 billion made General Motors boss Mary Barra (62) look like a superhero. In the current car madness, no one seems to be safe from nasty setbacks. In China, Barra has to restructure due to poor sales figures. This hits harder than any Bloody Mary: the realignment, including depreciation, costs GM more than 5 billion dollars.
Have a good week.
Yours, Christoph Seyerlein
Do you have any wishes, suggestions or information that we should take care of journalistically? You can reach my colleagues in the Mobility team and me at manage.mobility@manager-magazin.de
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