A mere 24 hours after VW Group CEO Herbert Diess announced that his company’s “center of gravity for software development” will move from Wolfsburg to Ingolstadt, Audi boss Markus Duesmann took charge and immediately found a replacement for software development boss Christian Senger.
Sanger, formerly in charge of the VW Group’s Car Software unit, will now make way for one Dirk Hilgenberg, who is a former senior VP of manufacturing engineering at BMW.
The first order of business is to take the full range of functions of the VW OS (operating system), and use it for the first time in a lighthouse model from Audi that will apparently be developed in record time at ‘Artemis’ – a new agile unit tasked with facilitating the acceleration of the development process.
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“The close cooperation with all brands and teams will be decisive for the success of the Car.Software organization. With my team at Audi, we are assuming a special responsibility as a premium brand. Because for many of our customers, premium is already defined today primarily through digital technologies that are perfectly tailored to their users. Our aim is for all brands in the Volkswagen Group to benefit from this pioneering role,” said Audi CEO Markus Duesmann.
Before the end of this year, VW’s Car Software organization will have some 5,000 specialists tasked with developing a common software for all VW Group brands: VW, Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Skoda, Seat.
Duesmann did thank Senger in the official press release for his “pioneering work”, while adding that Hilgenberg brings “extensive international experience in the integration of software products and technologies.”
