Geneva Motor Show - The biggest engineering feat on display when Volkswagen unveils its new concept car on Tuesday will be the team developing it: a post-Dieselgate management system crafted to operate faster, cheaper and with a lighter grip on the wheel.
Last year's scandal over falsified diesel emissions tests caused a cull of top managers at Europe's biggest automaker and brought a promise to overhaul the corporate culture.
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But the most meaningful management change taking place was already under way when the scandal broke: aimed less at preventing misdeeds than at improving profit margins, which had fallen behind competitors under an inefficient hierarchy.
Its concept for the Geneva car show will be the first vehicle the Volkswagen brand develops under a new, decentralised system designed to emulate rival BMW, which has a track record of quickly and efficiently getting new cars to market.
VW will present the concept version of a new compact SUV - and will develop the production version more rapidly than ever before under the new streamlined process.
The move has been led by VW brand chief Herbert Diess, who was previously the head of research and development at BMW, where a flexible corporate structure allows expert teams to run vehicle development without interference from top management.
Volkswagen was notorious for a system that spread responsibility for model development across layers of committees and funnelled final approval through top executives.
TIME AND DISCIPLINE
Although the need for changes at the VW brand was amplified by the emissions crisis that emerged in September, the former BMW executive had already been pushing decentralisation since taking office last July.
Future models such as the new SUV, which is expected to go on sale in 2018, will be developed by teams with full control over technology, quality, costs and launch dates.
Four new teams of about 100 experts each will focus on the main production series at Volkswagen, covering small, compact, mid-size and battery-powered cars, with the aim of shortening the process from concept to production, which previously took 48 months, to equal BMW, which says it can develop a new model in just 36 months.
That’s a big change from the system under former boss Martin Winterkorn, who insisted that development decisions had to be passed by top management.
Insiders have said decisions under Winterkorn (who resigned in the wake of the #Dieselgate scandal) could be held up by other items on the executive board's agenda, or delegated to committees that met only every four weeks.
ISSUES
A senior brand manager said that when VW designers finalised a sportier look for the Beetle in 2010 without a rear spoiler for the drop-top version, top managers at the last minute ordered suppliers in Mexico to provide the parts and rework the design.
“We had issues all the time,” he said. “We need to fix that soon - and the only way is to have the same have people responsible for all the phases of a programme.
“Ideally the various stages to develop a car should run simultaneously, not consecutively. Our concept was different and, by comparison, strikingly inefficient.”
Since January 2016, hundreds of managers at VW's main Wolfsburg plant have changed offices and moved into four so-called project houses where strategy is mapped out for the new car groups - and the same changes will also be implenent at Audi in Ingolstadt.
Volkswagen has been lagging behind in an industry where most carmakers have development teams dedicated to one vehicle programme. BMW launched its system of teams overseeing the whole process of development for a vehicle in the 1990s and has recently refined it by integrating more specialists.