VW CEO confirms no Tesla deal in the making

VW CEO Hebert Diess put an end to rumors and confirmed that there’s no deal in the making with Tesla.

As we reported last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been in Germany visiting a few projects related to Tesla.

It ended with reports that Musk visited Braunschweig Airport, used by Volkswagen, to meet with VW CEO Hebert Diess.

Volkswagen confirmed that the meeting happened but didn’t elaborate on the nature of the meeting — leaving people to speculate.

Today, Diess shared a video of him giving Musk a test drive in the VW ID.3 electric car, but that didn’t end the speculation, as some still thought that a deal between Tesla and Volkswagen might be in the making.

A few hours after sharing the video, Diess commented on his post saying that there’s “no deal in the making”:

“Just to be clear: We just drove the ID.3 and had a chat – there is no deal/cooperation in the making.”

With the comment, he also shared a selfie with Musk:

There have previously been rumors of cooperation between Volkswagen and Tesla, which had previous partnerships with automakers like Daimler and Toyota.

During his short-lived attempt to take Tesla private, Musk reportedly did consider Volkswagen as a partner.

There were reports that Diess was pushing for it. But not only did a deal not happen — Musk gave up on the whole idea of taking Tesla private.

Executives from Volkswagen and its brands have been less dismissive of Tesla than the rest of the industry.

Audi’s CEO Markus Duesmann recently admitted that “Tesla is 2 years ahead of the industry in critical areas.”

The head of Volkswagen also implemented what he internally called the “Tesla catch-up plan” in order to close the software gap between the German automaker and Tesla.