Herbert Diess breaks the rules. We’re about to spend 60 minutes of his valuable time talking in his office – the hour has been strictly agreed with his minders – and given the exactness of the interval, plus the implied challenges and strictures of his massive job as head of the Volkswagen Group, I’m expecting him to be a serious, driven, time-poor and somewhat humourless individual. His predecessor, Matthias Mueller, nice guy though he was, was rather like that.  So it’s quite a surprise to find that within a couple of minutes, Diess and I are chatting cheerily about the plus points of the classic Triumph TR6, a car he says he owned, loved and sold for too little money. He also had several Minis and Beetles and still has a small collection of “non-group cars I don’t talk about” that just happens to include a Land Rover Defender. Within seconds, I’ve gleaned that Diess is a proper car enthusiast. In a mind-flash I remember him from his four “very happy” years at Rover (1999 to 2003) where he was instrumental in launching the new Mini. We are going to be okay.  We’ve been trying to organise this interview for a year, not least because Diess – who moved from BMW in 2015 to run VW just before its troubles became public – won one of our 2018 awards for brilliantly progressing a marque hamstrung by Dieselgate so that it hardly lost sales or market position. His non-arrival at last year’s awards event and limited availability since is the result of his rapid promotion to VW’s biggest job. Diess works in a comfortable but unostentatious suite of offices atop a monolithic building in Wolfsburg, looking out on one of the world’s largest car-building operations. He is a slightly built man of 60 whose frame betrays no evidence of self-indulgence. I’d put him down as a golfer or tennis player, if he ever gets time. He smiles easily, speaks perfect colloquial English and has an Anglo-Saxon liking for conversational informality.  I’ve heard a lot about Diess’s reputation for decisiveness, so I ask about a meeting early in his VW time for which he’s famous, just after the diesel thing broke. At this gathering, a plan for the bold, electric-specific MEB platform, which now looks ever more likely to win VW a large global advantage in electrification, was raised, discussed, formulated and agreed.  “It was soon after I arrived, about a fortnight after diesel happened,” he says. “I called the team together for a two-day workshop and together we created the MEB toolkit.  “We were in a very specific situation. We were strong in China and China is huge in electric cars. It seemed possible for us to be the first major company to create a specific electric architecture and use it across all our marques. Most people were using existing platforms for their electric cars because that needed less investment. It was a chance to overtake others.”  Despite the strength of this idea, Diess refuses to talk up its prospects because it has yet to deliver. “We hope it will work,” he says. “At present, we are still selling electrified models based on our MQB platform, but from next year, we may have an advantage.”  Future winning designs will have what Diess calls “chocolate bar” chassis, known to others as ‘skateboards’ – with flat floors, long wheelbases and plenty of unimpeded space for batteries between the axles. Ride heights will lift cars by 100mm to 150mm, he says, although engineers at Porsche and Audi are already at work cutting that down. Despite the reality of higher-riding cars, Diess believes classic ‘tall’ SUVs won’t necessarily maintain popularity. Taming aerodynamic drag is becoming vital to preserve battery range. It’s one reason, Diess believes, why Tesla hasn’t sold nearly as many Model X SUVs as other models.  What’s the shape of the future, I ask. Will electrified and conventional cars just fight it out? Will car makers try to force the market?  There’ll be no forcing, Diess insists. Progress will be variable and depend heavily on government incentives. “Tesla couldn’t have made its way without the $7500-a-car US government incentive,” says Diess, “or in Norway without their tax credits. But ultimately, the company that can make electric cars with positive margins will win. That’s where I think we have some chances…”  Talking future sales, Diess estimates that by 2021, between 5% and 6% of new European cars will be electric. That should expand to 20% by 2025, and between 30% and 40% by 2030. It’s an enormous change. How does it feel, I ask, knowing you’ll soon be shutting engine plants forever? “It’s true that in the next 10 years, we’re going to need to close about half our engine and gearbox plants,” he says, “but we’ll ramp up battery production enormously to compensate. We believe we’re covered for battery cell production until 2023 or 2024, but we will still need more capacity. That’s the big challenge. We have just launched the Audi E-tron and the constraint on delivery is the
Origin: The Wolf of Wolfsburg: Autocar meets VW boss Herbert Diess