Porsche’s Mueller to succeed Winterkorn as VW Group CEO — News reports

He had been tipped to replace Winterkorn during the latter’s bitter feud with his one-time mentor and former supervisory board chief Ferdinand Piech earlier this year.

In this March 12, 2015 picture Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, right, and Porsche CEO and member of the board of Volkswagen, Matthias Mueller, left, pose for the media beside a vehicle prior to the company’s annual press conference in Berlin, Germany.

Meantime, it was also reported that the tidal wave surging from the diesel cheating scandal is about the engulf small trucks.

The upside, he said, is that Mueller’s knowledge of the company offers the chance of “faster traction to help root out the problems within the organization”. Volkswagen declined to comment.

The board will also dismiss the head of its US business, the top engineers of its luxury Audi and Porsche brands and the head of brand development at its VW division, sources added, aiming to show it is acting decisively to end the crisis.

Osterloh, who also sits on the supervisory board, said, “We need for the future a climate in which problems are not hidden but communicated openly to superiors”.

“He is a good choice even though he may be seen as a transitionary CEO until another internal candidate such as VW brand CEO Diess has earned their stripes”, said Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst at Evercore ISI investment banking advisory firm. The EPA said that 482 000 vehicles sold in the United States since 2008 were affected but the company later announced that it had installed the software on as many as 11 million cars worldwide.

The crisis deepened on Thursday as officials in Europe and the United States stepped up their investigations. Now Chancellor Angela Merkel is urging it to act quickly to restore confidence in the Volkswagen name. “We aren’t going to tell them what these tests are”.

“Under my leadership, Volkswagen will do all it can to develop and implement the strictest compliance and governance standards in the whole industry”, Mueller said in a statement.

Half a dozen Greenpeace protesters were outside Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant on Friday, waving banners saying “No more lies!” in front of three diesel-engine VW Golf hatchbacks.

The task facing Mueller is enormous, with the latest issue of influential German weekly Der Spiegel showing pall-bearers carrying a Volkswagen vehicle decked out as a coffin under the headline “The Suicide”.

The scandal has rippled through the entire auto market, with manufacturers fearing a drop in demand for diesel-powered cars and tougher regulations. Under the test configuration, performance suffered but emissions were cleaned up.

So far, no other carmaker has been found to have used the devices.

Friday’s board meeting had originally been due to extend the contract of Winterkorn and set out a new management structure.

He said a number of employees had been put on leave until the details of the emissions cheating were cleared up.

Customers and motor dealers are furious that Volkswagen has yet to say which models and construction years are affected, and whether it will have to recall any cars for refits.