Our Sales Director Heinz C. Hoppe had said shortly before the introduction of the G the new high price "the child is in the well, we just make the best of it".
So it was decided to install a small team to accompany the G until the operational market areas accepted it as a normal part of the Passenger Car sales program. This is how VGW was born, short for sales off-road vehicles. The management was entrusted to Karl E. Henle, who had previously been the Stuttgarter in the management of Merfag in Schlieren. VGW depended on the export chief Everhard Herzog.
I was in market research back then and would not have minded a change of job. I met Mr. Henle at the Geneva Salon. I knew him from my previous activities as a transport consultant in Switzerland and he asked me if I wanted to do VGW with him. I said yes. Relatively soon afterwards I started at VGW.
Everything was new to us. We got to know many people in the commercial vehicle attempt, who helped us with all technical matters. The customer service was far from G and the spare part system had no parts.
We were still a bit removed from the series production. We had access to a couple of pre-production cars and those in the experiment were so kind to clean them for us (omnibus washroom settling trial hours for DM 250 ....). Luckily we found a car wash at the Autohof in Hedelfingen where we could wash the G at normal prices. For maintenance etc Mr. Duke approved for 1980 a special budget of DM 100.000, at that time a kind Batzen. Of these, 50.000 was released for consumption until June. When our money man Hopfensitz looked at the account balance at the end of June, she was burdened with DM 750.000. Uppps! Since the colleagues had probably more often times in trial, when it came to unforeseen meant "ha, I'm there but nos so e sales account", I suspect, the small series of professional garden grills in the finest V4A steel for the greats of commercial vehicle development was also so funded. The account movement was incomprehensible. Fortunately, Eberhard Herzog was a pragmatic person and he said: "Buebe, your money is gone, you find me nemme". In the 2. Halfway then every move had to be approved by hop seat and it ran neatly.
I had a great time. It was very interesting to look after something completely new and to build the bridge between commercial vehicle development and car sales. The paragraph was very timid and I knew the history of many G. When a customer called the Daimler and it was about G, he was passed on to me. So landed with me, who had just left behind Baden-Baden without fuel and said we should install a large tank.
Or the one who was too fast in a motorway exit on wet road, slipped out on all fours out, where the guardrail his G in the knees kicked and he tilted on the side and wanted to push it on a supposedly failing steering. He threatened with lawyer and dait not to accept the newly ordered S-class. I first talked to the dealer in Aschaffenburg, who said he should first pay the G, before that there would be no S-class anyway. I then talked to him and the lawyer and since he occasionally babbled, I could actually turn elegant. But he had been so clever, even to turn directly to the board and then got a kind of compensation for pain on the claw. That annoyed me, but since then I know what level you have to go into if you want something from a big company.
KE Henle let me run pretty freely and everything was actually loose and flaky. He did the things you need a Hierarch for, his wife drove one of our G's at off-road vehicle events on the weekends. Henle invented sayings like "With the G, that's fine, you drive over stick and stone" and everything was in butter.
Until HC Hoppe was back in Italy and talked to Dottore Boccanelli about the commercial vehicle business. Magirus-Deutz was very aggressive on his final days before integrating with Iveco and hurt us. They pushed the truck into the market with the 340PS-V12. They have painted the V12 red in Italy and a red V12 arrives in Italy anyway. The Dottore said "Makowitzki is the boss of Magirus-Deutz Italia and is a bad man". So Mr. Hoppe bought bad man.
What do we do with that? Sales off-road vehicle! And so I sat with 2 bosses, one right and one left of my office. One was told that he did it, but the other nobody said that he did not do it anymore. It was not that easy, his wife was a non-chairman of the supervisory board. Tricky thing. But luckily both had level, so it was possible. Not to think that would have been 2 women. Makowitzki found the situation stupid and cumbersome, but Henle suffered right. That went 1 year and so far that he suffered a heart attack. Luckily he survived him and went to the hospital for 3 weeks for a cure on the Mettnau. In the meantime, Mako has done well.
And so Henle went to the Duke and said he could not stand it anymore, he needed another job. It made a point and he was in Greece to collect debts in the Emirates for our local partner Fostiropoulos.
From then on it was only Mako and me.
