How Volkswagen’s Sins Fueled Its Redemption
In the aftermath of a diesel scandal five years ago, executives made a commitment to electric vehicles that now is paying off.
Ironically, Volkswagen’s misdeeds helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune.
In October 2015, a month after the company confessed to rigging diesel cars to conceal illegally high emissions, shellshocked company executives gathered in the brick-clad high-rise executive office building topped with a giant VW logo that looms over the carmaker’s main factory in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The financial commitment Volkswagen made then, when sales of electric vehicles were minimal, is paying off now as the company rolls out a line of vehicles developed from the ground up to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles.
The ID.4, an electric S.U.V., started arriving at dealers in the United States in March. With a starting price of $40,000 before government incentives, the vehicle may offer Volkswagen its best chance in years to reclaim some of the market share it once had with the Beetle. The company’s electric vehicle offensive is also well timed, as concern about climate change rises and countries like Britain, Spain and France set deadlines to phase out cars that burn fossil fuels.
Volkswagen’s swift journey obscures some lingering problems. Corporate governance experts say the company suffers from the same lack of outside oversight that helped allow a toxic corporate culture to develop, leading to the emissions scandal.
Christian Strenger, a vocal Volkswagen critic and a former member of the commission that wrote Germany’s corporate governance code, sees little chance the company’s overseers will expose themselves to more scrutiny. The supervisory board has only one member out of 20 who is not a representative of the three main shareholders or Volkswagen employees.
“Nothing will change as long as the old guard is there,” Mr. Strenger said.
The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential liabilities from lawsuits, such as one by shareholders claiming the company misled them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $5 billion. That is in addition to the tens of billions of euros Volkswagen has already paid in fines and settlements since 2017 after admitting that it programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions in testing conditions than in normal use.
Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen’s future rather than its past.
Volkswagen’s voting shares ended the week up 20 percent in Frankfurt trading and have risen 75 percent since December, despite the company’s reporting a 37 percent drop in net profit for 2020 after the pandemic gutted sales. Since 2015, the shares have more than tripled.
Volkswagen’s advantage goes back to the decision made at that meeting in 2015, weeks after the emissions scandal became public.
It was a major commitment, requiring billions of euros in investment to develop the platform and billions more to write software and retool factories. Volkswagen plans to spend $800 million just to equip its factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., to produce cars using the toolbox.
The platform, which is also being deployed at Volkswagen factories in Europe and China, will allow Volkswagen to exploit the big advantage it has over Tesla: size. With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second-largest carmaker in the world after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies over millions of vehicles and undercut Tesla on price.
By 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, UBS analysts wrote in this month’s report. They cautioned that Tesla retains a significant lead in battery technology and autonomous driving software.
The electric toolbox also allows Volkswagen to take advantage of an opportunity to rethink automotive design, unlike rivals that are simply adapting their existing gasoline models.
An electric car doesn’t need a gas tank or a large gearbox, and electric motors are smaller than internal-combustion engines. The batteries can be arrayed under the passenger compartment, freeing up space. Volkswagen says its electric ID.3 hatchback, which went on sale in Europe last year, has as roomy an interior as the larger Passat.
Already, sales of Volkswagen electric cars tripled last year, to 230,000 vehicles, as the company began rolling out the ID.3, the first car on the new platform. “2020 marked a turning point in customer sentiment,” Mr. Diess said during a news conference on Tuesday.
Not everyone is convinced. Mr. Strenger, the governance expert, who is also a former fund manager, said he sold Volkswagen shares this week. He gave Mr. Diess credit for being “very bold” but said the share price “does not relate to the real outlook.”
Category: Technology
Source: New York Times