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The 42-year-old descendant of the German Porsche and Volkswagen dynasty is significantly raising ambitions for his electric sports car brand Piëch Automotive.
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Anton ‘Toni’ Piëch, the great-grandson of the car icon Ferdinand Porsche and one of the 13 children of Volkswagen patriarch Ferdinand Piëch, takes the leap forward in the car industry. Piëch Automotive, the start-up he founded five years ago with his business partner Rea Stark Rajcic, announced on Monday that it had refueled with fresh growth capital at the tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
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Piëch Automotive also brought some heavyweights from the industry on board. The Swiss designer of electric sports cars appointed Matthias Müller, the former CEO of Volkswagen, as chairman. At the same time, the company recruited some veterans from Porsche and Tesla for key positions. This indicates which competitors Piëch is targeting.
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The love for cars was there from an early age, but I found all those managers with their cocky behavior suspicious.
Anton Piëch
Co-founder Piëch Automotive
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You would be inclined to think that engine oil is flowing through the veins of the 42-year-old descendant of the German Porsche and Volkswagen dynasty. Still, he reportedly got into the automotive industry with considerable reluctance. “The love for cars was there from an early age,” Piëch said in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt last year, “but I found all those managers with their cocky behavior suspicious.” His grumpy father, who passed away last year, had previously stated that he wanted nothing to do with his son’s car adventures.
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Piëch, who attended an elite boarding school in Zuoz, Switzerland, started his career as a journalist. First at the regional editorial office of the Zürichsee-Zeitung and later in China, after studying sinology at the American Princeton University. But gradually the entrepreneur woke up in him. He first tried it in the media, with the production of a documentary about the history of the car and an attempt at the wildly popular game show ‘Wetten, dass…?’ launch in China.
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When that came to nothing, Piëch decided to take his chance in the car industry. The industry has suffered one blow after another in recent years, including a series of cheating scandals about emissions and the rise of electric cars. But according to Piëch that just offers opportunities for new, smaller players. They can respond to challenges faster than the unwieldy mastodons that his ancestors built, he believes.
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Piëch, whose hipster beard and sneakers stand out against the clean-shaven and in a tight suit hoisted car bumps, prefers to assume the profile of a trendy starter. For Piëch Automotive he got the mustard from large American tech companies. Just as Apple works with Chinese suppliers for the production of its iPhones, Piëch wants to set up partnerships with start-ups and tech companies for the production of its cars. Although his cars will never become a mass product like the iPhone. For the Mark Zero sports car, the price tag would fluctuate around 150,000 to 170,000 euros.
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