Electric Car Tsar

Volkswagen aims to move out from beneath the shadow of dieselgate and into a bright, electric future

- Gavin Green

WELCOME TO WOLFSBURG, or Stadt des KdF-Wagens (‘city of the KdF car’) as the Nazis originally called it. It was built to manufacture the ‘people’s car’ commissioned by Hitler, and to house its workers. Slave labour, many from the local concentration camp, produced military vehicles there during the war. It was renamed Wolfsburg after the local castle, on the advice of the British occupying power. The giant factory was dismissed by UK, US and French motoring experts as unworkable, and the Beetle as unsaleable. They would become, respectively, the world’s biggest car plant and the world’s best-selling car.

Some 70 years later, Volkswagen would become the world’s biggest carmaker and, at about the same time, the most scandalridden. Juergen Stackmann agreed to join Volkswagen just 14 days before the diesel crisis broke, in the autumn of 2015. As Volkswagen’s electric car tsar, he was responsible for leading the company’s path to redemption. “Do we continue as the bad boys or do we become part of the positive change?” the 59-year-old asked over a coffee in Wolfsburg. We know the answer. Or at least the aspiration.

Stackmann has been positively evangelical about electric cars. He was a key driver of the ID project and its first progeny, the upcoming ID.3. This is not some half-baked EV conversion of an ordinary petrol car, like most battery-electric dullards on the market. It’s a bespoke electric car, bristling with ingenuity, 360-degree environmental logic and, in all probability, a rosy sales future. No carmaker invests as much in EVs as the one-time dirty diesel diehards from Lower Saxony.