Carl Hahn, VW CEO who led automaker's U.S., China expansion, dies at 96

Carl Hahn, who led Volkswagen Group's international expansion in the 1980s, died on Saturday. He was 96.

Hahn died in his sleep at his home in Wolfsburg, according to a spokeswoman from his charitable foundation. A ceremony is planned for Jan. 24.

"Carl Hahn was a great visionary and a great personality," Oliver Blume, current CEO of the German automaker, said in emailed statement on Sunday. "Volkswagen AG and Wolfsburg owe Carl Hahn a great debt of gratitude and mourn with his family."

Born in Chemnitz in eastern Germany in 1926, Carl Horst Hahn Jr studied business administration and economics, receiving a doctorate from the University of Bern.

He joined VW in 1954 and became its chief in 1982. During his decade-long tenure, VW built factories in China, acquired Seat in Spain and Skoda in the Czech Republic, and expanded into former communist East Germany.

"Until then we were too focused on Germany, we were a national company. Except for the Americans, there were no global brands," Hahn said in a 2020 interview with Automotive News Group's German language publication Automobilwoche.

"We started with Seat and were able to get Volkswagen out of a crisis when we were only losing money in our German factories," he said.

Hahn also started Audi's transition to the luxury-car segment.

In the 1960s, Hahn led VW's business in the U.S. and helped establish the Beetle as an icon of American pop culture. Disagreements over strategy led to his departure to tire-maker Continental in 1972 before returning 10 years later.

After being succeeded as Volkswagen CEO by Ferdinand Piech in 1992, Hahn served another five years on the company's supervisory board.

Hahn chronicled his career in the autobiography "My Years With Volkswagen," published in 2005.  

As head of New York-based Volkswagen of America from 1959 to 1964, Hahn took a hands-on approach to selling cars. He toured the U.S. in a VW bus, using his charisma and excellent English to turn Americans onto "the Volkswagen way," Andrea Hiott wrote in "Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle" (2012). He computerized VW’s offices and standardized service to increase efficiency.

Most important, he brought VW to Madison Avenue, choosing Doyle Dane Bernbach — which became DDB Worldwide, part of Omnicom Group — to design what Advertising Age magazine called the top campaign of the 20th century.

As conceived by art director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig, the plan included the unconventional print ads "Think Small," celebrating the compact size of the Beetle, and "Lemon," focusing on quality control.

At a time when U.S. automakers were running "stupid advertising" focusing on the ever-changing looks of their cars, VW and DDB presented "our philosophy of a car that does not change for the reason of change, only for the benefit of the consumer,” Hahn said in a 2011 talk at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Marketing skills

Hahn’s marketing skills helped the Beetle become the best-selling single car model in history, with more than 21.5 million produced between 1945 and 2003.

Though commissioned and envisioned by Adolf Hitler, the Beetle was embraced by America, where it inspired artists, transported hippies and starred as Herbie in the Disney movie franchise that began with "The Love Bug” (1968).

Hahn returned to VW headquarters in Wolfsburg following his election to Volkswagen’s governing board in 1964 and led the sales department. He lost his seat in a shakeup that took effect in 1973 and left VW to lead Continental Gummi-Werke, Germany’s largest rubber company, a forerunner of Hanover, Germany-based Continental.

In 1982, VW brought Hahn back as chairman and CEO following the resignation of Toni Schmucker.

During Hahn’s tenure, VW became the No. 1 automaker in Europe, opened new plants in China and Eastern Europe, acquired the Spanish car company Seat, and introduced new versions of its Golf model, known in the U.S. as the Rabbit.

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain, Hahn put VW's industrial might behind German unification, building plants in the formerly communist East, and entered a joint venture with Czech carmaker Skoda Auto.

At his retirement at the end of 1992, Hahn told Automotive News that his biggest regret was losing market share in the U.S., where he had first made his mark.

Global vision

"My objective was to make a global network out of a company that was a big exporter and had many foreign subsidiaries," he said.

Carl Horst Hahn Jr was born on July 1, 1926, in Chemnitz, part of the Saxony region of eastern Germany, to Carl Hahn and the former Maria Kusel. His father headed sales for Auto Union AG, the automaker that is a forerunner to what became Audi AG.

Drafted as a teenager into the German military, Hahn ended World War II in a U.S.-run prison camp in Ingolstadt, he told a German newspaper in 2011.

He fled communist East Germany for the West after the war, earning a doctorate in economics from the University of Bern in 1952. He trained in Italy for Fiat and worked in Paris for the Organization for European Economic Cooperation.

Fast rise

From Paris, he wrote to Heinz Nordhoff, VW’s postwar leader, offering his idea for exporting cars throughout Europe.

Nordhoff liked Hahn’s "way of thinking," if not his specific proposal, and hired him in 1954 as his personal assistant, Hiott wrote in "Thinking Small." Hahn soon was promoted to the export department, then landed the assignment to open the U.S. market.

At the time, Hiott wrote, the U.S. "was finally beginning to take a second look at the little car that it had rejected and ridiculed for so long" — the Beetle.

"By the mid-1950s, while most adult Americans still identified the car with Hitler and the war, there was now a new generation that had come of driving age who had less connection to the car’s turbulent history."

"They had nobody assigned to America," Hahn recalled in 2011. "I had never been to America. I learned, apparently very fast, to get to know and understand America. And I loved it."

With the U.S.-born former Marisa Traina, whom he married in 1960 and who died in 2013, Hahn had four children and nine grandchildren.