Volkswagen will be led by the production chief of Bentley.Volkswagen has fired all but one of the unit’s current executive board members in an effort to turn around the struggling company and selected Bentley manufacturing head Peter Bosch to lead its software subsidiary Cariad.

Bosch will take over on June 1 and two other software professionals will join Cariad’s board of directors in addition to him and the board’s sole remaining member, head of human resources Rainer Zugehoer.software update

Volkswagen announced Bosch, a former Oliver Wyman consultant who worked for the Volkswagen brand for over seven years before moving on to Bentley in 2017, would also take over financial management at Cariad, confirming a previous Handelsblatt article.

Bosch, according to Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume, “is a strategist, an enabler, and a team player.”

One of the two software positions will be filled by Thomas Guenther, who is now a senior vice president at Cariad, according to sources who spoke to Reuters earlier on Monday, as first reported by Manager Magazin.

According to Blume, the business is negotiating new positions within Volkswagen with exiting Cariad Chief Executive Dirk Hilgenberg and his staff.

The radical changes are the result of Blume’s strategic evaluation of every aspect of the automaker after taking over from Herbert Diess, who founded Cariad but failed to establish it on a firm foundation, last September.

Blume stated without elaborating that Cariad is “speeding up and broadening our approach to partnerships.”

A new software platform meant to enable “Level 4” autonomous driving, expected to be applied across the fleet from 2026, has reportedly been delayed to the end of the decade due to delays and overspending at Cariad.

Automobile manufacturers are vying with one another to provide cutting-edge software-powered features, from autonomous driving to in-car entertainment, that will give them vital information about consumer behavior and vehicle performance.

To streamline development and maintain control over what he thought would be the important area of innovation for cars in the future, Diess combined Volkswagen’s efforts in the field into Cariad.

According to sources cited by Reuters on Monday, Blume does not expect to entirely change course under the new leadership, but he does want to place more emphasis on partnerships than on going it alone in order to advance the carmaker’s software objectives.

One source stated, “We will make some changes, but this is hardly a 180-degree shift.