BERLIN— Volkswagen’s board appointed the head of its Porsche unit as CEO on Friday, handing longtime company insider Matthias Mueller the task of trying to lead the world’s top-selling automaker past a growing emissions scandal.
The company also said it was suspending some employees and would reorganize its North America operations after admitting it used a piece of engine software to cheat on diesel car emissions tests in the U.S.
The decisions come after the previous CEO, Martin Winterkorn, quit the job this week over the scandal, which has shredded the company’s reputation.
The company could be heavily fined and hit with class-action lawsuits costing billions. It will also have to fix programming it has said is in some 11 million cars worldwide, far more than the 482,000 identified last week by U.S. authorities.
The 62-year-old Mueller, who has spent his career with Volkswagen Group brands, acknowledged that he was taking the job “at a time in which our company faces unprecedented challenges. I have respect for this, but I am also facing this task with confidence.”
Speaking at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, he said he would “do everything to win back the trust of our customers, our employees, our partners, investors and the whole public.
“We stand by our responsibility,” he said. “Occasionally, our and your patience will be tested, but ... carefulness is even more important than speed.”
Mueller said it is “decisive that nothing like this ever happens at Volkswagen again. So we will introduce even tougher compliance and governance standards in the company.”
He pledged to make Volkswagen “an even stronger company.”
The main risk of VW’s decision to go with an insider is that some in the markets could consider Mueller “tainted” by association with the crisis, said Jason Hanold, managing partner of Evanston, Illinois-based executive search firm Hanold Associates.
The upside, he said, is that Mueller’s knowledge of the company offers the chance of “faster traction to help root out the problems within the organization.”
Acting supervisory board Chairman Berthold Huber lauded Mueller’s “great strategic, entrepreneurial and social competence” and “critical and constructive” approach.
“He knows the group and its brands well and can immediately engage in his new task with full energy,” Huber said.
Winterkorn, who had been CEO since 2007, said he took responsibility for the “irregularities” found by U.S. inspectors in VW’s diesel engines, but insisted he had personally done nothing wrong.
Volkswagen offered few new details Friday on the fallout from the scandal.
