It’s hardly surprising that Klaus Zellmer, chairman of Skoda for the past six months after more than two decades at Porsche, enthusiastically describes himself as a car guy. Anyone who has spent his working life rising through the ranks at the legendary German sports car maker (he was CEO of Porsche Cars North America for five years from 2015) is bound to fit that description.
The more interesting question is why a 23-year Porsche man should be drafted into Skoda, which sits at the opposite end of the Volkswagen Group’s price and prestige spectrum – especially since one of his recent Skoda predecessors, Bernhard Maier, spent five years as Skoda’s CEO after a similarly lengthy Porsche stint.
Zellmer says it’s all a coincidence, so my opening question about whether aspects of Porsche management are seen as useful to the job of running Skoda gets short shrift. The group does stuff like that, with managers and designers too. The main similarity between both jobs, says Zellmer, is that he’s moving from one successful company driven by a strong brand to another.
According to contemporaries, Zellmer has been chosen to lead Skoda because of his reputation for dynamic management. Previous chiefs have built and burnished the marque along the same broad path, but Zellmer will be the one who must lead it headlong into the electrification age. And as every car exec knows, that task is hardest for affordable marques because the considerable investment required has to be especially carefully balanced against the returns from modest car prices. Yet there’s plenty of ambition at Skoda: by 2026, it will have launched three new EVs; by 2030, it expects 70% of production cars to be battery-powered.
To achieve these things, Skoda has two life-changing projects on its agenda: its now-until-2030 strategy plan called Next Level, and the development and adoption across the whole range of a new design language called Modern Solid, a move group bosses have already described as “the most dramatic change” since VW acquired the Skoda marque in 1994.
Both moves are consistent with the VW Group’s reputation as the industry’s most successful manager of car marques that have a high degree of commonality, and whose cars fit into similar price ranges. Perhaps one reason for the success has been a concern in recent years that some of the models have been getting too close. “We need to do a better job of clearly distinguishing Skoda from Volkswagen, Seat and Cupra,” says Zellmer, “to ensure that our sales are incremental, not substitutional.
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