Source: Volkswagen plans to fire most of the management team at Cariad next week, after the software unit missed its development goals and exceeded its budget
again Jan Schwartz / Reuters : Bentley production chief to lead Volkswagen's software overhaul - sources Jonathan M. Gitlin / Ars Technica : Volkswagen's troubled software division is getting new leadership. Again. Monica Raymunt / Bloomberg : Volkswagen Set to Tap Bentley, Porsche Executives for Software Shakeup Tweets: Sawyer Merritt / @sawyermerritt : NEWS: VW is set to dismiss all but one of the executive board members at its software division Cariad next week to try to resolve development problems. The unit - set up under former VW CEO Herbert Diess - has exceeded its budget & failed to meet goals. https://www.reuters.com/... Alex / @alex_avoigt : Rumor: VW CEO Blume About To Fire Next Week the entire Cariad Management According to a report by “Business Insider”, Volkswagen Group CEO Blume wants to remove the entire management of the software subsidiary Cariad, which is struggling with problems. The top managers have... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The mass dismissal is the endgame of a four-year arc: Volkswagen unified its fragmented IT efforts under Car.Software in 2019, pledged to write 60% of its vehicles' software in-house by 2025, and staked roughly $30B on catching Tesla — a plan that was already flagged as hampered by internal battles, technical glitches, and a complex structure.
The ID.3's faulty launch software forced one reboot of the business, which became Cariad under Herbert Diess; with Diess gone, the unit missing its development goals and exceeding its budget, VW is replacing nearly the entire executive board with a Bentley production chief plus other Bentley and Porsche executives.
First-order effects
- All but one member of Cariad's executive board is set to be dismissed next week, with the $30B software push passing from Diess-era leadership to a team drawn from Bentley and Porsche — putting premium-brand product people in charge of VW group software.
Second-order effects
- Within days of the purge, sources reported VW had held talks to use Huawei software in China — the new leadership structure making externally sourced code politically possible where pure in-house orthodoxy had stalled it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 2019 ambition of a monolithic in-house vw.os collapses into a hybrid model: a slimmed Cariad orchestrating partner stacks — a path confirmed when VW later ran a complete reset built on Xpeng and Rivian partnerships.
The trend: Carmakers that bet on vertically integrating all their vehicle software in-house are retreating toward brand-led teams and external partners, with each missed milestone accelerating the shift.