Auto industry | Right emotions

Audi boss Gernot Döllner Photo: Imago/ Mike Schmidt Gernot Döllner is considered a manager who aims high. The Audi boss has set the “clear goal” of competing for the Formula 1 World Championship in 2030. The 57-year-old does not say that this “motorsport” with combustion engine speeders and extremely high material and fuel consumption is completely outdated in view of the mobility transition. Döllner's car world is about "emotional charge," as he emphasizes in interviews. Taking on social responsibility is not his thing.

So his appearance at the weekend at a hate speech campaign event by US President Donald Trump, for which the engineer from Lower Saxony received a lot of criticism in Germany, cannot really come as a surprise. He announced a billion-dollar investment in the state of Georgia. Mind you, Audi is part of the VW Group, where radical cost-cutting measures are currently being introduced at the expense of employees. This is also why VW Group works council boss Daniela Cavallo expressed her dismay at Döllner's appearance with Trump: "Several minutes full of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, contempt for democracy - and then one of our top company representatives comes on stage and actively helps the campaign."

Döllner came to the VW Group at the age of 24 after studying mechanical engineering at the TU Braunschweig. After a few years at the Porsche brand, he returned to Volkswagen in Wolfsburg in 2021, where he took over management of group strategy and the general secretariat. Two years later, he became head of the Progressive brand group, which, in addition to Audi, also includes pure luxury brands such as Lamborghini and Bentley. Here, too, there is a backwards strategy with exclusively designed fuel pumps without switching to battery drives, which is why large sales slumps are being recorded, especially in the huge market in China. Audi is bashfully producing new electric cars there without the logo with the four rings in order to appeal to a young target audience.

It is more classic right-wing emotions that Audi stands for under Döllner. A clear position against the right is not part of the demeanor of the native of Bückeburg, who completed his high school diploma at the Adolfinum high school. This would be particularly important for VW, which was founded during the Nazi era as a model Nazi company and later not only worked with the military junta in Brazil, but also committed human rights violations itself. And Audi's predecessor, Auto-Union, equipped the Wehrmacht.

Audi is not only involved in Formula 1. The car manufacturer is a major sponsor and shareholder in Bayern Munich, of course one of the big players in world football, and Döllner is deputy chairman of the supervisory board. Because as in the USA under Trump and in Formula 1, he also wants to aim high in image-rich commercial football.

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