… and it runs — and it runs — and it runs — … how much longer?

„And it runs. And it runs. And it runs." — Volkswagen once advertised the Beetle this way: the promise of indestructibility. Today the company has its own leadership asked, anonymously, how much longer.

I. The Self-Examination

In late 2025, someone in Wolfsburg had an unusual idea. Two days before its annual general meeting, Volkswagen knows first-hand how the company is doing — because the company asked itself. The eight group board members, the incoming Porsche chief and the members of the supervisory board were asked, anonymously, for honest answers; the results, folded into a 177-page transformation paper produced with the consultancy BCG, were presented by CEO Oliver Blume to the supervisory board in late April. What manager magazin's reporting makes accessible is a self-assessment of rare bluntness — and precisely because it remained anonymous, blunter than anything the same people say in front of the workforce or in public.

Six of the nine board members consider their own company a danger to its own survival. Three more call the situation strained. Uncritical no one chose. Heavier still is a second finding: nine of nine consider a fundamental redefinition of the business model necessary — developing cars in Germany, building them in Europe, selling them worldwide no longer works. They judge the North America and China strategies unanimously as not sustainable; for China, one answer was missing entirely. In the background, a quarter in which the group's after-tax result collapsed by 28.4 percent, from 2.19 to 1.56 billion euros.

Der Spiegel captures in a single sentence what is remarkable here: this diagnosis comes not from automotive experts and not from expensive consultants, but from the company's top people themselves. That is the first shift. For years the darkest assessment came from outside — from analysts, from critics, from us as well. Now those responsible are more pessimistic than any observer once dismissed as too pessimistic.

II. The Belief Audit

Let us stay a moment with the name the company gave its instrument: Belief Audit. One audits a company's finances, its supply chains, its compliance — things one must measure because something depends on them. One audits the belief of one's own leadership only when one can no longer take it for granted. The mere existence of this elaborate procedure is already the diagnosis, before a single result is known: a company that commissions a survey of whether its board members still believe in it essentially already has the answer.

And the English term betrays the second truth. It is the language of consulting into which German industry has grown — except that this time it is applied not to a product but to the conviction that was once self-evident. The small irony on top: the procedure was meant to measure cohesion and documented the opposite. A survey that looks for unity and finds disintegration is not a measurement error. It is a self-portrait.

III. The Mask Is the Diagnosis

The great shift lies not in the content but in the form. That Volkswagen's situation is critical no one disputes any longer. What this survey reveals beyond all the figures is the condition under which its participants could speak the truth: anonymously. One must take this circumstance seriously rather than dismiss it as a methodological detail. Nine people at the top of a corporation say what they see — but only if their name does not attach to it.

A board member who can describe his own company truthfully only under the guarantee of anonymity has lost something that weighs more than any balance-sheet figure: the ability to say, in his own name, what he knows. We have described this pattern elsewhere — as vassalage, as a system that has no language for dissent voiced in one's own name. Whoever objects takes a risk; whoever stays silent stays.

The anonymity of this survey is not the method by which the diagnosis was obtained. It is the diagnosis.

IV. United in Disagreement

And now the real riddle. Nine of nine consider the business model no longer viable, nine of nine judge China and North America unanimously. These are not nine outsiders formulating an appeal. It is the body that would hold the power to change. On the diagnosis there is unanimity — on the direction there is not: four board members call themselves at odds, four broadly in agreement, completely in agreement none. The supervisory board sees it harder still; of fourteen answers to the question about unity on the board, eleven read: at odds. manager magazin calls it united in disagreement. It is the precise formula of paralysis: consensus on the finding, disintegration on the way forward.

A corporation like Volkswagen is itself a megamachine. Everyone works his own area, everyone does what his function demands — and in the end no one is answerable for the whole. That is exactly why the same leadership can unanimously diagnose a threat to its survival and remain without result. A machine made of nothing but jurisdictions, knowing not a single responsibility, can diagnose itself but cannot heal itself.

The radical change that nine of nine demand would require a subject to carry it out and to answer for it. The megamachine has none. It has only areas — and, at their interfaces, the disagreement in which the will to change neutralizes itself.

That the machine is larger than the sum of its operators is not a character flaw of those involved. It is the signature of a system whose feedback loops were suppressed for so long that it can no longer steer itself. It senses the deviation from course — and does not correct it, because no single area is responsible for it and all of them together form no "I" that would.

V. Three Consultancies for One Sentence

A few months ago our analysis of the Rivian partnership ended with a former group board member's sentence: The complexity will yet kill this company. Back then it was one voice. Now it is six of nine, and they no longer speak in retrospect but about the present.

And here a circle closes that one could hardly invent. The anonymous record of its own existential fear the board had drawn up by a consultancy — BCG. The resulting paper the supervisory board then has counter-checked by a second consultancy — Roland Berger. And the chief financial officer, who evidently does not trust the result himself, sends the figures to a third — PwC. Three consulting houses, so that a corporation can reach an understanding about whether it still believes in itself.

The decline-consulting that costs Germany fifty-one billion euros a year otherwise delivers PowerPoints about transformation. This time it delivers the diagnosis, the counter-check of the diagnosis, and the counter-check of the counter-check. The sentence We are a danger to our own survival, however, the board must say itself in the end. Anonymously, triply externally certified — but itself.

VI. The Prehistory

There remains the question this survey leaves open and that no anonymous questionnaire can answer: against what exactly is the radical change supposed to be directed? The nine demand it unanimously — but the change they can imagine moves within the apparatus that is the problem. A different China strategy, a different North America setup, a leaner structure: that is the language of correction, not of cause.

For the situation surveyed here with such alarm has a prehistory. It does not begin with bad China figures and not with the failed software. It begins where Germany, over decades, severed its value creators from the fruits of their labor — the inventors, the Mittelstand, the machine-tool builders, the suppliers. Whoever digs away the sources of renewal for decades stands, eventually, exactly where this board now stands: it sees the danger, it is in agreement, it wants the change — and it no longer has the substance out of which the change would come.

The anonymous survey is the most honest document Volkswagen has produced in years. It is at the same time the most hopeless — not because of the figures, but because its honesty had to hide its face. When those responsible can speak the truth only behind a mask, the truth is no longer a basis for action. That is the real threat to survival. Not the quarterly loss. The silence around it, which even a board member dares break only masked.

And with that the question stands in the room that determines all the rest: Since when was this foreseeable?