Dear reader,
Employers and employees at VW have had a lot in recent days fought into the night for an agreement in the industrial dispute. The breakthrough is now apparently getting closer; There is growing hope in Wolfsburg that the billions in savings will be found before Christmas. We’ll keep you updated today.
In the manager magazin’s mobility team, we admittedly made a much easier decision much more quickly: after this newsletter, we will take a two-week break. Thank you for your interest during this nerve-wracking year. Before we turn to cookies and punch, we have another packed program. These are our topics of the week:
Why Porsche is reaching for the Bugatti majority.
What the Danish takeover machine DSV is planning to do with DB Schenker.
Why Tesla and Polestar hope for tougher climate protection targets.
Topic of the week: Why Porsche is reaching for the Bugatti majority
Bugatti, that was once the fastest dream of Volkswagen grandee Ferdinand Piëch, who died in 2019: luxury sports car with a speed of 400 km/h. Piëch revived the brand, which was discontinued in the 1920s. After his death, Herbert Diess (66) no longer saw any real use for Bugatti at Volkswagen. The Croatian sports car start-up Rimac took over, with Porsche as a minority shareholder. Things haven’t been going really badly for the brand since then, but apparently not good enough either. My colleague Michael Freitag reports on friction in the joint venture and the possible consequences that could symbolize something like “Piëch’s return”: Porsche is considering taking over the majority stake in Bugatti
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Heads: Michaela Schmitz ++ Elon Musk ++ Michael Robertson ++ Thomas Klein ++ Fabian Brandt
The EU will tighten its CO2 regulations in 2025; on average, new cars will then not be allowed to emit more than 93.6 grams per kilometer. Depending on the car manufacturer, fleet emissions must be reduced by between 9 and 21 percent, according to a calculation by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). Anyone who doesn’t have a problem with this thanks to high e-car quotas could cash in: For Tesla, for example, selling certificates to other car manufacturers whose model mix is too dirty has been lucrative for years. In 2023, the brand earned $1.8 billion through “CO2 pooling.” Lame electric car manufacturers like Polestar are taking notice. New boss Michael Lohscheller (56) wants to get deeper into the emissions trading business
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Deep Drive: Full of juice
Do the batteries of electric cars become smeared after a few years, as is sometimes the case with laptops or smartphones? According to the testing organization Dekra, such fears are unfounded. The experts have more than 25,000 State of Health tests
carried out on electric car batteries to determine the remaining capacity of the batteries. Even vehicles with high mileage usually perform well. For example, six Jaguar I-Pace that have been used as taxis in Munich since 2018 and have between 180,000 and 260,000 kilometers on the clock. The state of health of your drive batteries: between 95 and 97 percent.
The number of letters that VW and Audi wrote to their German dealers increased noticeably at the end of the year. First, the top corporate sales representative Marco Schubert (50) announced the future of so-called agency sales – actually Beacon of hope for additional billions in sales
– in the first quarter of 2025 want to check
. Then VW Germany boss Achim Schaible (56) rushed forward and quickly explained the sales model for economic failure
. A little later, Schaible’s Audi counterpart Philipp Noack (51) took the same approach and canceled the agency prematurely. Now it was Schaible’s turn again and announced to the dealers that they would be terminating the agency contracts this year. Noack then pragmatically sent the Audi dealers a document for digital signature on Tuesday morning of this week.
And on Tuesday afternoon another letter with the title: “Merry Christmas and a good start to 2025”.
There is nothing to add to that.
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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You can also find our newsletter “manage:mobility”. here on our website.