VAG Boss Steering Bombshell

[snapdragon]

(Reuters) - Ferdinand Piech, a towering figure at Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) for more than two decades, resigned as its chairman on Saturday after losing a showdown he had provoked with Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn, ending an era at the iconic German carmaker.

Piech, the 78-year-old grandson of the inventor of the Volkswagen Beetle Ferdinand Porsche, had previously seen off other executives who crossed him, including his own hand-picked successor as CEO, Bernd Pischetsrieder.

But this time he was unexpectedly isolated in a five-to-one vote of Volkswagen's steering committee last week, as labour representatives, the state of Lower Saxony and even his own cousin Wolfgang Porsche stood firmly behind Winterkorn.

"The members of the steering committee came to a consensus that, in the light of the past weeks, the mutual trust necessary for successful cooperation was no longer there," the six-member panel said in a statement after another meeting on Saturday.

Berthold Huber, the senior trade unionist who will take over until a new chairman is elected, said: "The uncertainty had to be ended today. The steering committee was and is conscious of its responsibility to Volkswagen and its many thousand staff."

Two sources with knowledge of the matter said Piech had resigned without forcing a vote of the committee at its second crisis gathering in 10 days.

Piech resigned with immediate effect from all his roles at Volkswagen including as an ordinary supervisory board member, as did his second wife Ursula, a former nanny who joined the supervisory board in 2012.

"Piech's departure represents a seismic shift in Volkswagen's power structure, and could foretell drastic changes in how one of the world's largest automakers operates," wrote Karl Brauer, senior analyst at analysis firm Kelley Blue Book.

[tc4332]

Wow!!!!!
Seismic shift
In 1959 whilst a Vehicle Electrician with 91 Car Company, 1 Corps Troops Headquarters in Germany we were invited to Wolfsburg to watch Beatles being manufactured. The one thing that impressed me at 19 years old was the gigantic press that was producing the complete side of the VW Bully in one press. I wonder if he was the young chap I remember was helping to load the sheet metal into the press?
How things have changed since those days. The German men that worked with me could change a Beatle engine in 20 minutes. Three guys, push one in and then driving it out with a different engine. And they only had a pit, but no trolley jacks running on the pit sides, nor car ramps/lifts.
We still had DKV, Auto Union, Heinschell and Goggomobil to mention a few.
My personal car at the time was a 1953 Opel Kapitan.
I knew nothing and it was only a relatively short time after the war. Embarrasing when I think back, how naive I was expecting everyone to be able to speak English. I have many tales of misshaps, like trying to buy a tram ticket not knowing where the tram was going. Thanks to my German workers, I soon learnt the language and things then improved.

[tintin]

It's called "swimming against the tide" - it seems he was acting in an increasingly autocratic manner (the appointment of his ex-nanny to the board in 2012 is an slightly unusual idea).

It's also an interesting contrast to how an Anglo-American corporation would handle things - very much consensus driven, and I can't imagine a UK/US multinational appointing a union rep as a chairman (even on a temporary basis)