Looks as though it's going to be Porsche

[73standard]

Old bed fellows getting back together.

[dnyed]

Is this a good thing? I'm dumb in the area of business.

[73standard]

It's not a bad thing. And seeing how Porsche designed the Beetle to start with, well... it's like a homecoming.

[hoonbug]

This is a good and bad thing.

The bad thing is that Porsche are unlikely to reform the poor productivity of the German factories, meaning only one thing: more non-German factories. Moot point for the US - your VW's are built in Mexico. If there was anything to be gained by better resale due to perceived quality of some models because of the Made In Germany sticker, that will be gone.

The good news is that possibly Porsche will be able to part share a bit more. There's very little reason to invest so much money unless you intend to make money from it (VW stock is pretty low compared to its market reach), or to leverage your investment by obtaining more volume for parts you need. For example, there's no reason why Porsche cannot use most of the behind the scenes VAG stuff, like climate control systems, ECUs, etc and just produce those bits that they actually need to make specially for themselves. That will improve Porsche's already good profitability by reducing costs on the input side.

Secondly, they may be looking for more dealers in more countries. US and EU sales are basically stagnant. They can only improve their position by exporting more cars to more places. Once the Cayman and the Boxter lineups are in full place, they have a very large spread of models, which requires considerable local investment in dealerships. If they can leverage the premium VW dealerships already in place, they will save a lot of setup money and be able to sell more cars to more places without diluting the exclusivity (you don't really want to dump 50,000 Caymans into the Australian market as the resale for those cars will go down. But if you have no dealers in Elbonia (say), then using good Elbonian VW dealers to open a bit of floor space for your models will get you an incremental 100-1000 sales, which would have otherwise gone begging.

I don't think they'll ever do another VW / Porsche 411/914 entry level model again. The Touareg and Cayenne are priced significantly above the Passat / Boxter, so there's no point in having a Porsche A-platform car. Think if there was a Porsche version of the Eos. It'd compete directly with the Boxter.

Porsche has said that they want to have more people stay in the Porsche family, which is why the Cayenne was brought out.

Entry level Golf - nothing.
A platform Eos? - Boxter
B platform Audi A4 - Cayman
Luxobarge Audi A6/A8 - nothing
SUV Touareg - Cayenne
Sports car Audi TT? - 911
Supercar Veryon - various limited edition versions of the 911

Hard to say if Porsche really wants to fill or share the supercar platforms, or even if they want an entry level car, which in my view would really dilute their brand. But an obvious place is the four door grand tourer or 2 door GT coupe (like Merc's CLS). They don't have anything there today. Sharing components / platforms with another mass volume model would help drive down costs.

thanks,
Andrew