Platform strategy, nice idea

When Piech took CEO of Volkswagen, the company had a whole bunch of different cars. They aquired Skoda, Seat togehter with the already affiliated Audi.

Then came Lopez with his new ways of procurement (lower the quality until guarantee costs are higher than saved money)

Then came Piech with his platform strategy. The idea was to have five basic cars platforms and to badge-engineer the different models around it.

Piech left and with beginning of 2003 they ended up with 28 different platforms. Including the beetle, which is still in production in Mexico and which is the only car which really deserved to be called being build on a platform

Kind regards
Eberhard