Ramiro is President of ZF North America and head of the company's global Steering business unit. He has spent 30 years in automotive, left it once for aerospace, and has come back to engineering. In this conversation with Jan Griffiths, he gets specific about what his Chinese customers are doing that Western OEMs are not.
A customer looked at ZF's active suspension and worked out how to change a flat tire without a jack. Same hardware already on the vehicle, new functionality, software doing the work. Meanwhile, the Western specification book has been growing for a hundred years, page after page, all for good reasons, until it moved past anything a customer can feel.
Ramiro calls tariffs a tool in the sandbox, useful for buying time. He is just as direct about what happens if the industry spends that time defending the status quo.
The second half is about how he leads it. A German foundation owner under real pressure, a workforce across the US, Mexico, and Canada, and an answer that is not a new org chart. Communication is treated as an investment; people are sent to see other realities with their own eyes; and accountability sounds like "where are we" instead of "why didn't you."
Episode Highlights
00:00 Intro
01:42 Two tours at ZF and why aerospace felt slow
05:40 Eight percent of revenue on engineering, and whether it returns
08:00 The flat tire that needs no jack
12:02 Cost reduction versus value reduction
14:17 Steer-by-wire and video games at the charger
17:15 Tariffs are a tool in the sandbox
19:17 Send him to China
23:18 The engineering dream meets the P&L
27:24 A hundred years of specifications
30:06 Who are you as a leader
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#AutomotiveLeadership #ZF #Tariffs #SoftwareDefinedVehicle #authenticleadership
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The Automotive Leaders Podcast is hosted by Jan Griffiths, the champion for culture change in the automotive industry. From a farm in Wales to the C-suite of a $3 billion Tier-1 supplier, Jan built her career inside this industry. Now she's out to transform it.
Her argument is blunt. The pressure on this industry isn't letting up. The survivors will be the ones who reinvent how they work. Speed wins. Everyone else gets left behind.
Every episode, Jan sits down with the leaders driving that change. Real conversations about tariffs, supply chain shocks, EV uncertainty, AI, and the shift from command-and-control to authentic, human-centered leadership.
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