If you simply noted that Ferdinand Piëch was responsible for the Porsche 911, you could theoretically stop there…show’s over, move along. In a strange way, you can correlate the success of the 911 to that of the Ford Mustang…both are about the same age, both are considered iconic machines that have become more than just a random production car to millions the world over. But the 911 is only a tiny, tiny fraction of what the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche himself managed to make happen in his eighty-two years on this planet. He was instrumental in the development of the Porsche 917 race car. He did the technological work behind the Audi 80 and Audi 100. He was the drive behind the Audi Quattro. He developed the inline-five diesel for Mercedes-Benz. He took over Volkswagen in 1993 and turned the company around from near-bankruptcy to success it had never known before. He brought on numerous brands, such as MAN, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, Lamborghini and more. 
Piëch wasn’t a man without faults. His leadership style was point-blank…he would fire subordinates with the ease of saying “good morning”. By his own admission, he would fire anyone “who makes the same mistake twice.” He was aggressive and demanding, which could backfire on him in certain situations. He kept VW from going into the red, but at the same time the Bugatti Veyron, the period-point-blank monster of a machine that set numerous speed records, lost Volkswagen money for each copy sold, yet he still walked away looking like a hero and smelling like a rose. Eccentric? Yes, for sure, but the man that turned Audi from a home for wayward econo-boxes to a luxury marque, the man who put Volkswagens on the map in possibly a better way than his grandfather had done, had used his eccentricities to make the automobile far better than before he set his sights on target.
Rest in Peace.
I met and had cocktails with him in Ann Arbor in about 1975 or so. He was at EPA to oversee the certification testing of their cars at the lab and my friend and commuting partner was their “cert rep” – the person at EPA who worked with them to get their cars thru the certification process. So I was along at the watering hole as we chatted. He was perfectly nice to me (a lowly technician) and the thing I remember most was they he was a friend of David Packard’s and so had one of the first HP calculators. We all marveled that it could do more than our main frame computer at the lab.
Great story, Dan Stokes! Car people are the most amazing people on the planet. There are, for the most part, no socio-economic barriers between enthusiasts. It’s really cool to hear about meetings like this that happen just by happenstance.