It was born, in part, from the twin flames of ego and irritation, both Dr Ferdinand Piëch’s. As Volkswagen’s most visionary and feared boss, Piëch called the Volkswagen Group’s strategic tune, whether it was for the boldly rational or an indulgence bordering on folly. The Phaeton was certainly a product of logic, in the mind of Piëch at least, but would quickly come to be seen as a curious, and very expensive, irrelevance. But in the grand arc of this piercingly blue-eyed engineer’s career, decisions of grand vision and rationality easily outweigh the Piëch technical adventures that might be considered folly.
For vision, look no further than an industrial strategy that saw the Volkswagen Group revitalising Seat, polishing Audi and VW, acquiring Skoda, Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti and Porsche (Ducati, MAN and Scania too), while underpinning the entire grand plan, literally, with a vehicle platform matrix that saw many multiples of models sharing their innards, to the collective and spectacular benefit of Wolfsburg’s bottom line. This was surely Piëch’s greatest industrial legacy.
For folly, consider the grievously underselling, beautifully conceived alloy-bodied Audi A2, the aborted VW W12 supercar, the capital-crushing Bugatti Veyron, the brilliant limited-edition high-economy experiment that was the VW XL1 and the luxury VW Phaeton.
