"I am endlessly sorry." I'm asking for your trust." Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn on Tuesday sounded like a husband, whose wife just found another woman's phone number while doing the laundry. But as he pleaded with disillusioned buyers to give him a second chance, he stopped short of admitting guilt.

Winterkorn is likely to repeat the ritual as he steps before the executive committee of the Group's supervisory board on Wednesday: "I am endlessly sorry. I'm asking for your trust."

But the sense of betrayal may still be too fresh, the cut too deep. Whether he actually cheated - or at least helped cover up the cheating - may no longer matter.

It's an unexpected twist of fate for the 68-year-old, who looked emboldened after surviving a Spring coup by his former mentor and VW patriarch Ferdinand Piech. And it could go down as one of the most dramatic falls from grace in the history of the industry.

Humble beginnings

That something like this could happen under Winterkorn's watch seems almost ironic. Raised on the doorstep of Germany's auto empire, Stuttgart, the working-class kid from Leonberg was virtually born with octane in his blood.

"Anyone who, like me, came of age in the post-war era, grew up with cars...And if you grew up in Swabia, near Zuffenhausen [the home of Porsche], and watched as the stunning Porsches drove by every day, you couldn't help but develop an interest in cars. And that's why I became a car engineer," Winterkorn told DW in an interview last year.

After graduating from the University of Stuttgart with a degree in Metallurgy and Metal Physics in 1973, he went on to receive a doctorate from the Max-Planck-Institute for Metal Research four years later.

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