Biography | Florian Huettl — The Rüsselsheim Board That Put Him in the Opel Chair

People treat the Opel chair as a post that turns over once a decade.

In the five years before Huettl it turned three times.

Michael Lohscheller left in September 2021.

Uwe Hochgeschurtz lasted from that autumn until May 2022, then moved to Stellantis as chief operating officer for Enlarged Europe.

On the evening of 17 May 2022 the supervisory board of Opel Automobile GmbH named Huettl, then forty-five and three months into the sales-and-marketing seat, as the next chief.

The company press release from Rüsselsheim the next morning set the start date at 1 June 2022.

He took both Opel and Vauxhall.

The pin is the Opelturm on the plant campus, the 1929 office tower that still marks the works from the S-Bahn at Rüsselsheim Opelwerk.

The legal address on the imprint is Bahnhofsplatz, 65423 Rüsselsheim am Main.

The tower sits a short walk west of the town station, at the factory itself.

Huettl had joined Stellantis only in March 2021.

The June 2022 brief was not a twenty-year climb inside Adam Opel AG.

It was a sales man from Renault, nine months after the last change, asked to run the only German brand in the Stellantis set.

On 7 April 2025 the same board extended the contract by three years, through 2028.

The plant still builds cars on this ground.

The visitor who gets off at Opelwerk sees fences, sheds, and the tower — not a public museum of the appointment.

Photo: Gerd Fahrenhorst, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons