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Written by Jason Barlow
"I have some new cheat box! No one"s ever going to find out about this one" British comedian Simon Brodkin, aka Lee Nelson, pranked disgraced FIFA president Sepp Blatter last year, and earlier this week he disrupted Volkswagen"s Geneva press conference. VW"s sales and marketing board member J rgen Stackmann barely missed a beat: "It doesn"t need repairs. It"s a perfect car."Stackmann is a key player in VW"s post-dieselgate reputational recovery. He wearily concedes to TG.com in a meeting after his difficult day that being the butt of the joke is just one of the prices you pay after a screw-up of such monumental proportions. "I thought: hang on, this didn"t happen in the rehearsal" Besides, it"s small beer compared to the 5.2bn set aside so far to rectify customers" cars and absorb the legal bill that awaits, but still hurtful for a company that was such a resounding symbol of German corporate strength. Where the hell do you start? Stackmann is crystal clear on this."The first thing to do is to carry out every service recall with the same, uncompromised quality. We understand the challenges: I visited our 10 biggest fleet customers recently and spoke to them about the situation. Some of them have bought 25,000 cars from us so they are big customers. They expressed no doubts about the core qualities of the engineering on our vehicles. But there were clear question marks over our corporate culture."This has been one of the key questions: was something fundamentally and badly broken at the top of VW that resulted in such unethical behaviour?"It"s very tough to take a view on that," Stackmann says. "As employees, we were all just as shocked as everyone else. We"re as interested in the results of the report [due early summer] as you are. There probably isn"t a company as German as Volkswagen. So we all thought this can"t be true"Stackmann is leading the charge on explaining to VW"s "five or six million customers who need persuading that we are competent. Our goal in 2016 is to regain the trust of our customers by bringing the cars back to the right standards. They want the same noise, the same performance, the same fuel economy, and the same experience, so that"s going to be bloody hard work." But while this behemoth prepares to shift its approach, like a supertanker doing a three-point turn, he also stresses that "there is a lot of competence in the house. We have to be careful not to delete that".
Date written: 3 Mar 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 2414
"I have some new cheat box! No one"s ever going to find out about this one" British comedian Simon Brodkin, aka Lee Nelson, pranked disgraced FIFA president Sepp Blatter last year, and earlier this week he disrupted Volkswagen"s Geneva press conference. VW"s sales and marketing board member J rgen Stackmann barely missed a beat: "It doesn"t need repairs. It"s a perfect car."Stackmann is a key player in VW"s post-dieselgate reputational recovery. He wearily concedes to TG.com in a meeting after his difficult day that being the butt of the joke is just one of the prices you pay after a screw-up of such monumental proportions. "I thought: hang on, this didn"t happen in the rehearsal" Besides, it"s small beer compared to the 5.2bn set aside so far to rectify customers" cars and absorb the legal bill that awaits, but still hurtful for a company that was such a resounding symbol of German corporate strength. Where the hell do you start? Stackmann is crystal clear on this."The first thing to do is to carry out every service recall with the same, uncompromised quality. We understand the challenges: I visited our 10 biggest fleet customers recently and spoke to them about the situation. Some of them have bought 25,000 cars from us so they are big customers. They expressed no doubts about the core qualities of the engineering on our vehicles. But there were clear question marks over our corporate culture."This has been one of the key questions: was something fundamentally and badly broken at the top of VW that resulted in such unethical behaviour?"It"s very tough to take a view on that," Stackmann says. "As employees, we were all just as shocked as everyone else. We"re as interested in the results of the report [due early summer] as you are. There probably isn"t a company as German as Volkswagen. So we all thought this can"t be true"Stackmann is leading the charge on explaining to VW"s "five or six million customers who need persuading that we are competent. Our goal in 2016 is to regain the trust of our customers by bringing the cars back to the right standards. They want the same noise, the same performance, the same fuel economy, and the same experience, so that"s going to be bloody hard work." But while this behemoth prepares to shift its approach, like a supertanker doing a three-point turn, he also stresses that "there is a lot of competence in the house. We have to be careful not to delete that".
Date written: 3 Mar 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 2414
