Porsche battles government over VW control

So wait, let me see if I understand this. Porsche bought a stake in the Volkswagen Group. And the Volkswagen Group owns: Volkswagen, Audi, Lamborghini, Bugatti, & Bentley. Talk about a major player in the luxury market.

mhh21- Porshe has had a stake in VW for a very long time. The two share technology and soemtimes facilities. Porsche is protecting itself by aquiring a substantial interest in a major partner. A strong VW is of paramount importance to Porsche.

If the gov't had been doing their job Porsche wouldn't have had to buy so much VW to keep it from being a takeover target.
T

I found the following one day. It makes for interesting reading.

"Porsche builds 88,000 cars a year compared to VW's five million. And it has sales of $7.7bn compared to VW's, um, $120bn. Blimey! That's a difference."
The profit figures were more interesting, however, with Porsche making $293m and VW only $923m.
"So Volkswagen builds 55 times as many cars as Porsche and makes only three times the profit.

The Porsches are a proud lot and clever too.
So clever in fact that the current chairman of Volkswagen is a member of the Porsche family. Ferdinand Piech is the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, the man who originally went to Adolf Hitler with the idea of building cars for the people.
Hitler liked the idea of a "Volks Wagen" and the first Porsche-designed VW appeared at the Berlin Motor Show in 1936.
It never made it into production because of the war and afterwards Porsche and his son-in-law Anton Piech were thrown in jail by the French for having worked for the Nazis.
Porsche's son Ferry and his daughter Louise (Piech's wife) started a small factory in Gmund in Austria and built the Cisitalia Grand Prix car in order to raise the cash needed to buy their father's freedom.
Once that was achieved they decided to start building sports cars as they were no longer welcome in the post-war Volkswagen company.
But in 1949 Volkswagen chairman Heinz Nordhoff did something blindingly obvious and asked the Porsches to help him develop the original Volks Wagen design.
The result was the VW Beetle.
As part of the deal the Porsches negotiated a royalty on every single car sold and as VW would sell 21,529,464 of them in the course of the next 55 years the family did pretty well out of the deal, not to mention also gaining the VW concession for Austria, a tidy little business in its own right.

The money produced helped the Porsche family to expand their own car-making business, and in the early 1960s Ferdinand Alexander Porsche (Ferry's son) styled the all-important 911 which made the company so successful that by 1972 it was floated on the stock exchange, although the family still owns 76% of the firm, while also diversifying into real estate, watches, luggage, tennis rackets and, of course, the Austrian car dealerships.

"The family seems to believe that VW owes everything to Porsche and want one day for that to be reflected in reality."
The purchase of 20% of the Volkswagen company comes at a time when Volkswagen is about to lose the support of the German state of Lower Saxony, which is being forced to sell its 18% share by the European Union.
If Porsche buys that share it will have 38% of the business and as Volkswagen owns 13% of its own shares would then be in a position to control VW.
And that would mean that one day, perhaps quite soon, Volkswagen could become a subsidiary of Porsche.

It was a good plan and a better brand as well. Porsche is all about great engineering and design. Volkswagen is just about crunching out cars.
A

Porsche has been using its influence at VW for some time now. VW took the risk and expense of developing the Touareg/Cayenne while Porsche took the glory. This "joint" development was so much one sided that VW could not devote time, money or resources to developing the Q7/Q5 SUVs, hence the late arrival of this luxury Ute. A tidbit: VW supplies 80% of the components for a Cayenne. So...who is a luxury carmaker and who just crunches out cars?

Question to those who say audi is a rebadged vw. Following that logic, isn't audi well on its way to becoming a rebadged porsche?

ferrari is owned by fiat.
along with maserati.

i don't really think a 50 year old association "blackens" the porsche name, i think that is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard.
the 911 shares nothing with any vw.
porsche has a fantastic market place, i don't think they care about some loony saying "a porsche is just a 50 year old vw"
a 911 is a vw on steroids?
ummmmm.....how?
that is a very stupid thing to say.
is the 911 related in any to a beetle, other than the position of the engine?
ferrari owners do not in general care for heritage, most of them buy them because they simply can. do you think paris hilton cares about ferrari's history? she represents (whether we like it or not) a sizeable chunk of the upper-end car-buying demographic.

and if you'd like to do some fact-checking while you're up on la-la-land, dr. porsche invented the volkswagen (what we call the beetle) specifically for hitler after designing his original porsches. (as well as designing the tiger tank).
he worked for daimler-benz originally, and designed the beetle while working for them (so the volkswagen was a merc originally).
he left, designed racers for auto-union (part of which was audi).
so if we follow your very logical (not) idea, audis are porches and vws are benzes.
saying a porsche has "evolved" is stupid.
just because the car looks similar does not mean it evolved.
i don't think a modern porsche shares a single component, idea (bar the engine layout), layout of parts, any engineering or really anything with the 356, beetle or 911.
the current porsche shares 10-20% of parts with the 996, that had a completely different engine to the 993 (it was liquid rather than air cooled), which shared about 20% of parts with the 964 (it had completely new suspension), which was completely different to the original 911.
evolution?
no
revolution, but dressed conservativly?
yes