The recent announcement that Jaguar Land Rover has a new boss – Dr Ralf Speth – is a landmark for the UK car industry. The head of every major ‘indigenous’ UK car maker is now German.
The rollcall is as follows: Bentley: Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen; Aston Martin: Dr Ulrich Bez; Rolls-Royce: Torsten Müller-Ötvös; Mini: Dr Wolfgang Armbrecht and now Jaguar Land Rover’s good Dr Speth (in turn, reporting to the new head of Tata Motors, Carl-Peter Forster).
Now there will be those Britons who lament that Germans run our iconic English car brands. And, it’s true, a small part of me feels more comfortable addressing JLR issues to a man called David Smith, Aston issues to Bob Dover and Rolls questions to Tom Purves (to cite the predecessors of the German chiefs). If Britons ran Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen, I suspect there would be some anxious questions asked on the other side of the Rhine.
The Germans have mostly done a great job of running UK car brands
On the other hand, Doctors Bez and Paefgen have done great jobs at Aston and Bentley respectively. Dr Wolfgang Reitzle, when engineering boss of BMW, conceived the three greatest British cars of the past decade (Range Rover, Mini and Rolls-Royce Phantom). BMW’s Munich-based management has transformed Mini and Rolls, never mind its MG Rover screw-up. One has every assumption that Dr Speth, whom I don’t yet know, is absolutely top drawer (he spent most of his motor industry life at BMW, where he was latterly in charge of Land Rover – so he knows the territory).
All these good doctors are engineers. They know cars and the car industry.
One has to conclude that Germany produces rather more top-drawer car managers than we do; and certainly more engineers who go on to be good bosses. (And it’s always been my belief that the best car bosses are invariably engineers.)
So the best of British luck to Dr Speth
Britain, of course, is not without its capable car chiefs. Nick Reilly now runs GM in Europe, having replaced Carl-Peter Forster. The late Sir Alex Trotman was the worldwide boss of Ford in the ‘90s (the company’s first foreign-born CEO and chairman). And Mini’s Dr Armbrecht and Rolls’s Müller-Ötvös, I am happy to say, report directly to BMW’s worldwide sales and marketing boss, Ian Robertson, who is from Oswestry on the English/Welsh border.