After announcing the move back in October, former McLaren Automotive chief Michael Leiters has today become CEO of Porsche AG, officially taking over from Oliver Blume at the very start of 2026.
The move ends Blume’s dual role running both Porsche and Volkswagen Group and hands Stuttgart’s sports car brand to a leader with deep roots in performance, hybrids and SUVs.
A Return To Porsche With Ferrari And McLaren On His CV
Leiters is not an outsider, as he worked at Porsche from 2000 to 2013 in senior engineering and product roles, including responsibility for Cayenne and Macan programmes and early hybrid projects. After that he became Chief Technical Officer at Ferrari, where he helped bring hybrid halo cars such as the SF90 and 296 GTB to life, before moving on to serve as McLaren Automotive’s CEO.
He now returns to Porsche as it tries to balance heritage, high end sports cars and electrified crossovers. The brand still trades heavily on its classic back catalogue, with cars like a tidy 1964 Porsche 356C and a 1963 Porsche 356B reminding buyers where the marque came from. Leiters will be tasked with keeping that emotional pull intact while steering the lineup through a slower, more cautious move toward full electrification.
Fixing Margins And Resetting The EV Plan
Porsche is bringing in new leadership at a difficult moment, as margins have been squeezed by weaker demand in China, higher costs and a messy reset of its EV strategy. The company has already signaled that it will lean harder on combustion and hybrid flexibility rather than forcing an all electric timeline, which fits Leiters’ track record of using hybrid systems to enhance, rather than replace, traditional powertrains.
At the same time, Porsche continues to experiment with new technology that can keep its cars feeling special, even when the basic layout changes. Leiters will inherit that kind of work and decide how much of it reaches production as Porsche tries to stand out from premium rivals.
Oliver Blume will remain CEO of Volkswagen Group with an extended contract, freeing him to focus on the wider portfolio while Leiters concentrates on Porsche alone. For us, the hope is that a technically minded, Porsche bred chief can stabilize profitability, sharpen product planning and keep the 911 and its siblings feeling like genuine sports cars even as SUVs and electrified models take a bigger share of sales.
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