300mpg, on the road – Part one

Uncharacteristically for northern Germany, it hadn’t rained in weeks. And that was now becoming a problem. Not just for the farmers, but for a team of Volkswagen engineers, who had – once more – been tasked with doing the apparently impossible by their legendary boss.

But let’s start at the beginning – at least for me.

The challenge

I had my decisive job interview for the position of Head of Research for the Volkswagen Group at the beginning of 2000, a meeting for which Ferdinand Piëch arrived 15 minutes late from what I later discovered was one of his infamous ‘Schadens-Tisch’. In today’s vocabulary that meant a ‘morning stand-up meeting’ where he, as Group CEO, inspected the most offending damaged parts from testing presented by the respected (read feared) Group Quality organisation.