Dr Ferdinand Karl Piëch, 1937-2019

Ferdinand Piëch was a grandson of the legendary Prof Dr Ferdinand Porsche, born in Vienna, Austria, on April 17^th, 1937. He became a profoundly ambitious, daring and energetic engineer, company executive and businessman renowned for his abrasively autocratic style and aggressively dominating and outspoken demeanour.

Starting his career at the Porsche company, he rose not just as the old Professor’s grandson, but – while not being shy of wielding his family connections – much moreso upon his own talent, ambition, far-sightedness, determination and technical merit.

He had been born to Ferdinand Porsche’s daughter Louise and her lawyer husband Anton Piëch, and postwar studied at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz before graduating from the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule – far more conveniently known as the ‘ETH’ – in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1962. He had earned his degree in mechanical engineering with a master’s thesis on development of a Formula 1 engine. Concurrently, Porsche was taking its only two F1 race wins – the 1962 French GP and Solitude GP – with its air-cooled Typ 804 car’s flat-eight engine. 

From 1963 to 1971, Piëch worked his way up within the postwar Porsche company as developed by his uncle, Ferry Porsche, at Zuffenhausen, Stuttgart in Germany. There he was put in charge of development and testing.

Almost immediately he earned a reputation for applying ruthless pressure to his engineering staff to achieve daring and ambitious new objectives. He encouraged them to push the technical boundaries, not least developing the apparently ridiculously overhung, outboard rear-engined Porsche 911 concept until it not only handled, but handled well. He then concentrated especially upon boosting Porsche’s motor racing ambitions way beyond mere smaller-capacity class victory punctuated by occasional outright wins on suitably tortuous circuits.

Oh no, Piëch’s ambition was for Porsche to challenge outright for overall endurance-racing victory at FIA World Championship level. Through sheer force of personality – backed-up by sound engineering competence – he forced the board to underwrite such ambitious racing programmes as the 908 family of cars, followed by the epochal 917s. In 1968-69 he ensured that two-thirds of Porsche’s annual racing budget went into construction of the 25 initial Porsche 917s necessary to have them homologated (accepted) by the FIA as Group 4 Sports Cars… rather than as the purebred racing designs manufactured in quantity that they really were.

In fact his racing 908s had been manufactured in similar numbers through 1967-68 while Piëch simply dismissed and fended-off growing criticism from the Porsche family for sheer financial irresponsibility. The sales-promoting success of his racing policy would eventually silence their protests. ‘Piëch Porsches’ included the 2.0-litre flat-six 906 Carrera, followed by the growing engine-size 907, the magnificent 3.0-litre 908 family and then – ultimately – the 4.5 and 5-litre Porsche 917s.

It was upon his family’s agreed exclusion from executive roles with Porsche that in 1972 (concurrent with turbocharged 917 CanAm and InterSerie success) he moved to Audi in Ingolstadt. There, in 1975, he directed the engineering concepts of the Audi 80 and 100. In 1977 he became the driving force behind development of a car capable of dominating the World Rally Championship, the four-wheel-drive Audi Quattro with a turbocharged, five-cylinder engine. He was one of the motivators of Audi paying unusual attention to aerodynamic body design, and he drove the company’s introduction of rustproof galvanised body shells. Here was a man who combined technical prowess with a shrewd grasp of marketing psychology.

When he moved from Audi to Volkswagen in 1993, he was joining a loss-making German giant – co-founded by his grandfather – struggling to devise new models. He eventually became Chairman of the executive board (Vorstandsvorsitzender) of the Volkswagen Group, serving there from 1993-2002 and also Chairman of the Group’s supervisory board (Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender) 2002-2015. He later wrote: “Only when a company is in severe difficulty does it let in someone like me. I never would have gotten a chance (otherwise)…”.

Here’s a rare insight into this aggressive personality’s self-awareness. As one fired by him told me, “Piëch could be an absolute bastard, and he knew he was, but to achieve his objectives he would just do whatever it took… regardless… and it never apparently troubled him…”.

His reputation preceded him. Few would argue with Ferdinand Piëch and remain employed. Even the German union bosses seemed to shrink before him, and bent to his will. In quick time at VW almost the entire management board had been fired, and union leaders accepted a shortened working week. He promoted introduction of a modernised VW Beetle, achieving new sales success. And Volkswagen returned to profit. Audi, Škoda and Seat all became valuable parts of the Group. Piëch led acquisition of Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti nouveau.

There were failures, too. He never tackled overmanning and his fascination with mechanical complexity cost the Group millions to parade the occasionally mind-bogglingly intricate expressions of his technological ego. 

When he recruited an executive named Ignacio Lopez from Opel – a General Motors subsidiary – it led to controversy. Lopez was accused of stealing GM trade secrets. In the mid-1990s GM attempted to have Volkswagen designated a criminal organisation under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act. The Americans demanded up to $4 billion in damages. The affair was settled in 1997 when Lopez resigned from VW and the company acknowledged “the possibility” that some illegality may have been involved.

Piëch was required by Volkswagen company policy to retire at age 65, but he remained on its supervisory board and was involved in the company's strategic decisions until his abrupt (enforced) resignation in early 2015. Still VW had had a rocky ride. In 2004 a huge fuss erupted with VW being alleged to have condoned executives and trade union leaders indulging in bribery, corruption and “lewd behaviour”…. While Piëch escaped direct involvement in the tumult some of his subordinates faced criminal charges.

Uncaring of criticism, this remarkable man had simply sailed on. He took exception to his replacement at VW – former BMW CEO Bernd Pischetsrieder. As Chairman of VW’s Supervisory Board, Piëch then engineered Pischetsrieder’s replacement by an executive he had nurtured, Martin Winterkorn.

Like a Crown of Thorns plot, Piëch then led the fight by VW to resist a takeover plan from Porsche! This extraordinary up-start episode came at a time when VW was selling more cars each week than Porsche did in a year. But the financial crisis of 2008 stopped Porsche’s bid in its tracks – VW quickly hit back and swallowed the smaller manufacturer, at the price of the Porsche family owning a majority of VW voting shares and four seats on the Supervisory board.

Long-standing enmity between Piëch and the related Porsche family then had its pay off. Piëch’s view of his former protégé Martin Winterkorn had changed. Piëch publicly criticised him, whereupon Porsche family members took Winterkorn’s side and on April 25^th, 2015 Piëch was voted out as Chairman.

Meanwhile, one of his most significant technical innovations at Audi had been development of turbocharged direct injection (TDi) engines, which made diesel power practical for passenger cars, with its advantageous fuel efficiency.

Five months after Piëch’s loss of authority at VW, the devastating news broke that between 2009 and 2015 the company had sold some 11 million cars with software enabling their engines to deceive national Government emission-testing. While denying any knowledge of such deception, Winterkorn accepted ultimate responsibility and resigned. To date the scandal has cost VW over $30 billion. At the time the initial news broke, some observers suggested that a leak by Piëch had been made as a nuclear option, simply seeking revenge upon Winterkorn. Few who knew Piëch, his instinctively abrasive and aggressive nature, his modus operandi disbelieved such rumours.

In his private life Ferdinand Piëch was in many ways as unconventional as his professional career might indicate. He had 13 children from four different relationships. Their mothers include his first wife Corina, Marlene Porsche who was married to Piëch’s cousin Gerd Porsche and possibly this affair exacerbated the famous rift with the wider Porsche family, a girl left unidentified in Piëch’s autobiography… and his family’s former maid Ursula, who became his second wife (in 1984) and who survives him today…

Here was a spectacularly colourful, significant and highly successful character. Ferdinand Piëch, a quite extraordinary man.