With a leadership style described as "old fashioned", Piech was known for his prolific firing of subordinates throughout his career, particularly how he engineered the ousting of former Volkswagen CEO Bernd Pischetsrieder and Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. According to Piëch, he fires any subordinate who "makes the same mistake twice". "The Guardian" noted, "Piech was known for his ability to outmanoeuvre competitors by stoking internal rivalries to his own advantage, even if it resulted in turning against his own managers, including the VW chief executive Bernd Pischetsrieder, to side with VW’s labour leaders." Piech has leveraged this reputation to use threats and intimidation to get subordinates to meet his lofty goals; during Piech's induction into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2014, fellow automotive executive Bob Lutz recounted a conversation he had with Piëch at the Frankfurt Auto Show in the early 1990s, in which he remarked how he was impressed with the fit and finish and tight body tolerances on Volkswagen's new models. Piëch told Lutz that he achieved this by assembling Volkswagen's top body engineers in his office and telling them they would all be fired if all of Volkswagen's vehicles didn't have body tolerances of 3 millimeters within six weeks. "Wired" described Piech as "Machiavellian" and "an autocrat's autocrat". Bob Lutz said of his management style, "It's what I call a reign of terror and a culture where performance was driven by fear and intimidation[...]That management style gets short-term results, but it's a culture that's extremely dangerous. Look at dictators. Dictators invariably wind up destroying the very countries they thought their omniscience and omnipotence would make great. It's fast and it's efficient, but at huge risk." He would also describe Piech as a "mad genius" that while he respected, he would never want to work for or with at any capacity. Lutz, CNBC, the American documentary TV series "Dirty Money", among others, have claimed that the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal is the result of the ruthless and tyrannical corporate culture Piech installed at the company.