Macht, the 49 year old CEO whose place is taken over by Mueller too has a very impressive resume where he has been the head of production in the Porsche brand for 10 years where he then led the car-making division under Wendelin Wiedeking, the CEO who has since left Porsche after the whole VW takeover fiasco.
Mueller has been the product management chief with Audi, also a brand under the VW group for 4 years. The Boxster and Cayman models have fared quite poorly where in the first 9 months dropped by 12% which if translated is less than half of the Cayenne which is the best selling model from Porsche. Porsche had in February launched the 3.4 liter, 6 cylinder Boxster Spyder priced at €53,100, which is a top down version do try and stop the dropping sales.
According to Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of VW, they are planning to increase the number of models to 8 which is double of what they currently have which will include smaller versions of the Boxster which many expecting it to be cheaper as well. This is definitely possible with the recent inter-brand collaboration with VW where as with the recently launched Cayenne SUV, they ‘borrowed’ the Toureg and Audi Q7 platform.
VW is targeting to be the global leader in the automotive market where they are targeting to produce 150,000 units by 2013. With that in place, they hope to overtake Toyota, which is currently the world number 1 by 2018. Winterkorn added that by this year end, some 70 new models which include face-lifts and revamps would have been introduced of which 30 of them would be from the VW stable. One thing for sure, such ambitious plans would mean that the brands under the VW product line will grow by leaps and bounds in the next couple of years and we can surely expect cheaper and more affordable models pretty soon.
