Herbert Diess became Volkswagen Group’s CEO in 2018 after succeeding Matthias Müller and pushed the company toward electric vehicles.
Volkswagen announced Diess’s appointment in April 2018, and he became chief executive during the company’s difficult post-Dieselgate rebuilding period. Before taking the group’s top job, he had led the Volkswagen passenger-car brand and previously held senior engineering and management roles at BMW.
Diess made electrification a central corporate strategy. Volkswagen committed major resources to battery platforms, new electric models and battery-cell production, while presenting the modular MEB architecture as the foundation for vehicles such as the ID.3 and ID.4. The group also created Cariad, a dedicated automotive-software business, although software delays and internal disagreements weakened Diess’s position.
Readers sometimes confuse Diess with Oliver Blume, who succeeded him in September 2022, or with Matthias Müller, whom Diess replaced. Ferdinand Piëch and Martin Winterkorn were influential former Volkswagen leaders, but neither was the 2018 successor described here.