Mirjam Knoll

It's official: Markus Haupt confirmed as Chief Executive Officer of SEAT and CUPRA after serving as interim CEO since April.      Haupt began his career at SEAT back in 2001, and quickly advanced, gaining over 20 years of experience within the Volkswagen Group, where he held leadership roles in different locations and positions. 🔝     A driver of change, since joining the company in 2022 as Executive Vice-President for Production and Logistics, he has overseen a €3 billion investment to electrify the Martorell plant and has led the Electric Urban Car family project, including the #CUPRARaval, set to launch in March 2026.  ⚡️     📢 Thomas Schäfer, Chair of the SEAT & CUPRA Supervisory Board: “Having successfully led the transformation of SEAT and CUPRA’s facilities in preparation for the Electric Urban Car family, Haupt is perfectly positioned to shape the brands’ future”.      The announcement comes at a crucial moment for SEAT S.A.:     🚀 CUPRA continues to grow as a key pillar for the company, now with a fully-fledged portfolio and a growing global fanbase. In this sense, following its ambition to become one of Spain’s truly global brands, it is investigating new growth opportunities in the Middle East.     🙌🏼 Along with CUPRA, the SEAT brand remains a cornerstone of the company’s present and future strategy. With over 21 million vehicles produced since 1950, it is now poised to enter a new era in its history with the upcoming World Premiere of its bestselling models, the SEAT Ibiza and Arona. 

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We are investing in scaling AI – and giving process automation a strong BOOST! With the AI BOOST program, we are accelerating the use of Artificial Intelligence in our production and logistics departments. This is symbolized by the check handover between Christian Vollmer, Board Member for Production and Logistics at Volkswagen, and me. Our common goal is to make processes faster, better, and more efficient – with a strategic, Group-wide roll-out of successfully piloted #AI use cases. This initiative is part of a broader commitment: As Volkswagen Group, we aim to invest up to one billion euros in Artificial Intelligence by 2030. The focus will be on AI-supported vehicle development, industrial applications, and the expansion of high-performance IT infrastructures. My appreciation to Florian Lechner, Head of digital Production and Logistics at Volkswagen, Morten Lange, CIO of our Core brands, and their teams for the close and successful collaboration. We need more cross-department teamwork like this to bring Data & AI to value.

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I am just returning from the IAA MOBILITY Munich, where we were invited by our partners at AUDI AG to an evening event organised around their new car model. For AUDI AG this is not just a new release, this is a new beginning, the first expression of a new design philosophy, expressed as: Radical Simplicity, Clarity. To me, this feels just right. The car’s exterior design is very pure, reminescent of Audi’s roots but also very modern. But the boldest expression of AUDI AG’s new philosophy is inside the car. Instead of playing the race towards an ever larger screen in the cabin, AUDI AG decided to embed a rather small screen, which folds and disappears under the dashboard. From a positioning point of view, the focus on simplicity and clarity is exactly what I think we need. With the AI era, the value for OEMs, across industries, will not be in providing more content, but filtering content to optimize the cognitive load on the users. AI also gives the opportunity to provide much more naturally the exact information that the passenger needs at any moment, not more. This is also how Neural Concept envisions user experience. In our collaboration with AUDI AG, we hope that this software experience philosophy, into the hands of engineers, will then translate into the right experience for the consumer. Picture with Marwan Khiat who was lead designer on the interior of the car.

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