thirdgenbird

this whole thing has been a wild ride. for a time (early on) i thought porsche was gong to successful in buying out vw.

alexb76

Not really, more around tech and software/hardware engineering.

acao

The marriage will still happen. Porsche badly needs VW's economies of scale for mundane things like HVAC, door locks, and body stamping. VW needs Porsche's insane profit margins to offset its attempt to be worldwide #1. Going for volume will necessarily depress margins, with units like Porsche, Lambo, and Bentley to pad that. Overall though, Porsche needs VW more than the other way around. With Porsche's 918, 911-to-918 tweener, and the baby Boxster there's going to be some cannibalism of the Audi R8, Q7, A8, Lambo's cars, Lambo's long rumored SUV, Bentley's SUV, etc. My, this reminds of GM's brand ladder now that I think about it. That worked out superb.

Gliding_Serpent

Porsche needs to sue the people who changed the rules last minute to prevent them from getting a controlling share of VW by upping the % needed to an unattainable amount (the 80% rule I think). How many billions would that be?

This is all a joke. You short sell, and expect to get burned. Porsche didn't forcast their plans because it would have been countered. Simple really. Short sellers be dammed. Short sellers don't broadcast what they plan to buy, so why should Porsche?

The sad part is that the short sellers win in the end. How many of them do you think bought Porsche shares immediately after Porsche stocks dropped 15% (due to their announced lawsuit and failed merger)? And if this gets resolved they get more money, and even if their case gets thrown out... they win again because Porsche and VW stocks go back up and they sell. Porsche needs to counter-sue the short sellers for launching a law suit and causing their stock value to drop, and merger to fail. How much is that worth? More than 1.1 billion.

I hate the legal system. The a-hole short sellers win no matter what...

Welcome to life.

Minok

Porsche most importantly needs VW to get the fleet gas mileage and emissions into the newer government limits that are coming up, including the bizarro US regulations related to size of body vs emissions non-sense.

Macster

Actually, that's good engineering balancing the design of the parts so that fewer (ideally none) of the parts are over-designed. No sense in making some parts good for 500K miles when the car's going to be in the scrap yard after 100K miles...

I read in an article -- check that a Porsche book -- that the good Dr. Porsche said something to the effect that if he knew that initial flat 6 2.0l engine had that much overengineering in it to go tolerate more displacement and more output he would have ordered the engine redesigned to make it cheaper to make and thus to sell.

Sincerely,

Macster.

Tcc1999

But hasn't it always been the German engineering ethos that, "Why use 10 moving parts when 30 will also do the job?" Point being, Germans have always seemed to over-engineer - often times with great success and other times not so much.

sjfehr

No, that's still poor engineering. "Good" engineering would be scouring the junkyard to see what broke, and make that last 500k miles, too!

Gliding_Serpent

These days everything is becoming disposable. Even top notch home electronics (stove/fridge/etc) have a terrible lifespan. Thank god some cars were "over-engineered" so that we can still enjoy them today.

Let Porsche never become a disposable commodity. (THough some could argue that it has in some ways... 996 interiors for example).

Minok

One can debate what 'good engineering is'. Every product and its parts have a mean time before failure; everything fails. Good engineering is a design that works as expected AND is reasonably serviceable over the expected lifetime of the product.

There is no good engineering in a care designed and built to go 800,000 miles when statistically you will have another are run into you by 150,000 miles and destroy the frame. The expense to get those other 650,000 miles before failure was wasted.

Likewise, if you expect the car to last 200,000 miles at a minimum, then you may well want to engineer some parts to last to an expected failure point of 500,000 miles because those parts are very hard and expensive to replace or stock inventory for. At the same time you can have parts that give out after 50,000 miles because they are easy to replace and service cheaply and can benefit from repeated replacement.

Modern cars, you don't want, form an economic standpoint, to engineer and build so they last 20 years, because the features drivers expect 15 years down the road will have so much new technology and possibly new colors as well, that even if the car is still working after 15 and good for another 5, the owners may well scrap it.

German engineering, or rather design is different than American engineering/design, because they address different cultural expectations.

German's expect a high quality fit, form, and performance from their products and the design and engineer their products to deliver greatness in the expected attributes of that culture. American's want the cheapest product that just gets the job done. So designs are different as they target different expectations. Thus a German market VW Golf probably has higher quality plastic parts and finish on its interior than a US market Corvette. Its why a Braun coffee maker has a different fit and feel than a Mr Coffee or Sunbeam. Its why a German market product is also more expensive than an American market product (generally).

stubenhocker

Braun is actually owned by an American company, Proctor and Gamble.

stubenhocker

[QUOTE=Gliding_Serpent;8864200]These days everything is becoming disposable. Even top notch home electronics (stove/fridge/etc) have a terrible lifespan. Thank god some cars were "over-engineered" so that we can still enjoy them today.

You must have never owned a Miele washer and dryer or Liebherr refrigerator.

They are definitely not disposable!

In fact I think Miele is the finest quality made product of any German company I have ever owned!

Fahrer

Braun is still a German company designing small appliances. They do need to design to a price point though.

Fahrer

[quote=stubenhocker;8872708]Any brand of car is not as over-engineered as in the past as many cars are designed for people who lease cars. In this scenerio, the car is all about the 3 or 4 years driving experience, not how long the car will last. Increasingly, the decsion maker on a new car purchase is not as concerned about how the car ages ( due to leasing). It's "not his/her problem". Electronics are a great thing in leased cars, not as much in a "keeper".

Fahrer

Back to the OP's note, the merger is only delayed. After the investigations, etc., I would expect the merger is completed before the 2nd qtr of 2012.