Unfinished business

YOU DON'T KNOW what you've got until it's gone, so you can forgive global car makers getting nostalgic for life 10 years ago.

- NICK GIBBS

“Before Covid, before the semiconductor crisis, everything was peaceful. Now we just are waiting for the next crisis.” So said Seat and Cupra CEO Markus Haupt – and this is the view of a long-term Volkswagen Group executive who had to work through Dieselgate.

Logistics, for example, was “something nobody took care of, it was just running in the back office”, Haupt told me, but “now shipping cars globally is fraught with issues”.