In car companies, business economists and mechanical engineers without programming knowledge set the tone.
(Photo: action press)
For decades, the board members of German car companies had avoided the topic of car software. It was considered a waste of time to deal with it intensively. At the IAA 2011, the former Volkswagen boss Martin Winterkorn, who was obsessed with detail, was more interested in rattling levers when adjusting the steering wheel than in the software of a Golf.
This generation of managers often still has the say in the boardrooms. Only: The world around them has changed. In the future, only those car companies will be successful that have people at the top who are really familiar with software development.
That is exactly what is lacking in Wolfsburg. The discord on the board of Europe’s largest automaker is a symptom of this deficit. VW boss Herbert Diess and the other board members, Audi boss Markus Duesmann and Porsche boss Oliver Blume, know how to build cars. However, they do not seem to be familiar with the complex development of software code and the long-term consequences of decisions made when it comes to the hardware equipment of a vehicle.
Volkswagen is not a special case. Even at BMW and Mercedes there is not a single qualified software expert on the board. It is not computer scientists who set the tone, but business economists and mechanical engineers.
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Nowhere, however, is the confusion as great as at VW. Software development is delayed, new models from Porsche and Audi are coming onto the market much later than promised. In their desperation, the company’s car bosses try to solve the problems with approaches they know from the old mechanical car world – and thereby only make them worse.
Software unit Cariad is wildly buying up companies to increase the number of programmers. Audi and Porsche, in turn, cobble together their own software solution. Instead of building agile and lean structures based on the model of successful software companies, expensive and labour-intensive duplicate structures are created at VW in this way.
The car bosses at Volkswagen seem to be overwhelmed with the bulky matter of bits and bytes. But one thing is certain: the software in cars will not become simpler in the future, it will become more complex and take up even more space in the development of a vehicle. This space must also make itself felt in the board of directors. The car boss of the future is therefore not a machine builder, but a programmer.
More: Diess against Duesmann: Dispute over VW software alerts the supervisory board