New bosses for BMW and Volkswagen

BMW and VW have both got new bosses. At BMW it's Harald Kruger, a relative youngster at 49. The company calls it a 'generational change' in its management. Kruger's current job is head of production at BMW, but he has also run Mini and BMW.

BMW also has a new head of Development. He's Klaus Frohlich, a BMW lifer who has over the years been in charge of a whole series of ever-bigger engine projects, and most recently was in charge of all BMW Group small and mid-size cars. So his dabs are all over the new Mini, the FWD BMWs, plus everything else up to a 435i.

Meanwhile, over at Wolfsburg, the VW brand is to be run by Herbert Diess. Until this week he was head of R&D at... BMW. So it's quite a game of musical chairs. Diess was responsible for bringing the i8 and i3 to market, plus the FWD matrix cars (new Mini, and the FWD BMWs which will become ever more important and numerous) as well as almost finishing the 7-Series we'll see next year. Before that he was head of purchasing, a vital role at BMW during the cash-squeezed years following the 2008 financial crash.

Interestingly, Diess's appointment at VW was announced the very day Kruger got the top job at BMW. Does that mean he wanted the chairmanship himself, and gradually realised he wasn't going to get it and decided to look elsewhere? It's his departure that made way for Frohlich.

Whatever, the very fact that all these changes were announced on the very same day is a perfect illustration of how serious the whole German industry is about orderliness and alignment.

The job Diess has got at VW actually didn't exist before. The VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn ran VW as well as the whole group. Now Winterkorn will be able to stand back a bit to take the longer view of that industrial and commercial colossus: 12 brands, 10 million vehicles a year.

Actually, not until October 2015. That's the date Diess actually starts at VW. BMW obviously had him bound into a pretty tight contract, and in the meantime he's going to be able to spend an awful lot of time tending his garden. Or whatever it is alpha-male German car engineers do in their downtime.