Certainty is how industries die
I co-founded a car company without being a car engineer and later took a €7.5bn offer for Lamborghini to Volkswagen. Both times the industry knew better.
I am not a car engineer. I have been told so often enough. I had my first PC at twelve and was online at thirteen, as soon as that was possible, and I never studied computing either. I have taken cars apart since my first Alfa Romeos. I once put the engine of a 164 into a 156. None of this counts as a qualification.
So when I co-founded Piëch Automotive with my friend Anton Piëch, I came to the car from design and from brand. I found an industry stiff with its own success, the German part of it most of all. The thinking went: we do what works, and we do not need to start anything new. It had worked for a century, which is long enough to forget that it can stop.
A copy of everything
Our first car, the Mark Zero, was shown in Geneva in 2019. It is an electric gran turismo with the proportions of the late 1960s, a period of car design I admire without embarrassment: long bonnet, cabin set back, short tail. Designers understood it at once. It won several design awards, among them the energy efficiency prize of Design Prize Switzerland that same year.
The motoring press saw something else. Within days the car was a copy of an Aston Martin, a copy of a Porsche and a copy of a Maserati. It can hardly have been all three. A gran turismo follows the same proportions whoever builds it, because they come from where the engine, the people and the luggage go. The reviewers recognised the type and called it theft.
The German press had also decided who we were: two young men with no idea, building a sports car for fun, with no chance against Porsche. I was reminded in print and in person that I was not an automotive engineer and had no business in the trade.
The offer nobody read
A few years later I founded Quantum Group AG in Switzerland with one purpose. An investor from the Middle East, with the means and the patience, wanted to buy Lamborghini, and he liked what I had done with cars. In May 2021 we sent Volkswagen a letter of intent worth €7.5bn, more than nine billion dollars. It came with a five-year supply agreement with Audi, a five-year job guarantee and a new centre for battery technology in Germany.
Audi’s spokesman said Lamborghini was not for sale and that the group would not consider the offer. That is an owner’s right. What stayed with me is that nobody asked what was in the letter. I was young and had not spent decades on a supervisory board. I hold that against myself less than I used to, given what decades on supervisory boards have produced since.
Then the letter leaked. German journalists called, and what they wrote was a portrait of me more than a report on an offer: a curious investor with no background who did not have the money. I had never claimed the money was mine. I said so every time I was asked, and it changed nothing. Some went as far as doubting that the offer existed.
I took it badly. I withdrew from public life for several years, and it was a long time before I had the nerve to start companies again. I still doubt that I was the real subject of those articles. Mine was the name in them, though.
What certainty bought
At the end of June this year Germany’s car industry employed 691,500 people, the fewest since 2005, according to the federal statistics office. It had shed 42,300 jobs in twelve months. Volkswagen is removing at least 50,000 positions in Germany. I take no pleasure in any of it. I love the product, and I always have.
But an industry that could not listen to an outsider with a sketchbook, or read a letter before refusing it, did not listen to the Californians or the Chinese either. Those it could not wave away.
Expertise is real. I would not board an aircraft designed by an amateur. The trouble starts when a qualification becomes a reason not to listen. Everyone in that industry had the training I lacked, and the training did not save them. Outsiders are wrong most of the time. They also ask most of the new questions, and an industry that has stopped hearing questions has begun to die, however good the quarter looks.
As for the press, I am older and calmer now. Anyone who does things in public will meet people who look for the worst in it and who, finding nothing, write it up so that it sounds bad anyway. I would tell a younger founder what I could not tell myself then. Read it once, check whether any of it is true, and go back to work.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.