Volkswagen to name Porsche’s Matthias Muller new chief executive after Martin

Volkswagen’s supervisory board appointed Mueller, a longtime company insider, at a daylong meeting on Friday. The crisis wiped about €20 billion off VW’s market value this week, and the company estimates irregularities on diesel-emission readings extend to 11 million vehicles around the world. The company now faces a mountain of difficulties, from class action lawsuits to fixing the software itself. “In recent weeks, we have already undertaken important steps such as separating Group and brand functions”, said Huber who hoped the change could bring the Board greater freedom to address urgent issues regarding Group strategy, development and steering.

“He said Mueller’s priority would be renew VW’s leadership, restructure costs and turn VW into a “performance-driven company” where management was more accountable”.

Winterkorn, an engineer by training who spent nearly nine years at the helm of Europe’s largest automaker, resigned on Wednesday, taking responsibility for the biggest business scandal in VW’s 78-year history.

Mueller brings long-standing experience of several of Volkswagen’s 12 brands to his new job at the head of a sprawling group that has almost 600,000 employees worldwide. “There mustn’t be any taboos”, as the new CEO tries to “get to the bottom of this disastrous episode and to finally modernize Volkswagen’s outdated structures”.

Volkswagen installed a “defeat device” in its emissions software that reduced the amount of nitrogen oxides that were released in a test scenario.

Mueller will continue to act as chairman of Porsche AG until a successor has been found, it added.

The group based in northern Germany’s Wolfsburg declined comment on the subject when contacted by.

The announcement comes on the same day that Germany’s transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, said Volkswagen rigged emissions tests on some 2.8 million diesel vehicles in that country, following revelations last week that it had manipulated tests conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

After his apprenticeship, he studied computer science at Munich University of Applied Sciences.

At a New York promotional event Monday night, VW’s US leader Michael Horn said the company “totally screwed up”.

Reorganization is also coming to VW’s workings in North America.

Winterkorn, who claimed to know nothing about the cheating, apologized twice and said he was stunned by the scale of the misconduct.

This week Volkswagen revealed it had misled regulators about the diesel emissions from its cars, which were not as clean as promised.