Volkswagen targets $70.1B to $75.1B valuation in planned Porsche IPO
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
short term CEO for a quick short
The Volkswagen corporate structure is really confusing due to complex financial maneuvering by the Porsche/Piech family over the past 20 years. 30% of Volkswagen AG is owned by Porsche SE (a holding company under the control of the Porsche/Piech family, not the car maker), but those shares are more than 50% of the voting shares. Volkswagen AG contain Porsche AG (the car maker).
Porsche has been a money printing machine for quite a while, so why not cash in with an IPO when there is 0 risk of losing control?
Even if its free, everyone who works there may now start to base their performance off the stock price.
Counterpoint: I will not buy a car that does not support Apple CarPlay. That includes Tesla. I don’t want to deal with whatever proprietary garbage the manufacturer wants to run. I don’t want to sync contacts and settings to some half assed service a car manufacturer created.
Nope. I won’t even entertain buying a car that doesn’t support CarPlay.
You can just do a one time log in on all your accounts via the car OS and stay logged in on your phone at the same time.
The rest of the world doesnt have this dependency because they dont communicate via calls and iMessage but via Whatsapp/wechat calls and whatsapp/wechat texts
If anything the high reliance on a tyrannical ecosystem such as Apple underlines the high sensitivity of the public toward corporate cults and the power of advertising over masses. Ridiculing people who have android phones because of the “green text” is a national pastime which has by and large surpassed baseball
which in fairness was already evident in the era of Windows complete dominance over the desktop OS market …but at least the Microsoft ecosystem is free of charge (if you know where to look for it) given that from the early days the philosophy at Redmond is to turn a blind eye on piracy.
I mean yes, of course, put CarPlay/Android Auto into the Porsches. But the rest of it - no way. EVs have already passed the ICE in terms of performance and speed.
Cars like the 911, Mustang, Miata, etc need to be about the driving experience, the sound, the feel. They need to return to their roots. Ford was right to keep the manual transmission + V8 in the next-gen Mustang, but it's way too tech'ed out. Fail. The current-gen Mustang is going to end up being the collector's item in 15 years when everyone is daily-driving an EV.
Likewise, Porsche needs to return the 911 to a naturally-aspirated H6 with a manual transmission, and a small touchscreen for CarPlay. Even better if it folds or slides out of the way for the 99% of the time you aren't using it. Because when you are driving a 911 a decade from now, you aren't going to be using it. If you need it, you're driving your Taycan or whatever other EV you have.
EVs will always be inferior to ICE in corners which is basically all the fun driving.
See the ICEs vs EVs timing at Nurburgring, Spa, Suzuka, Laguna Seca etc.
The Taycan is the fastest production car on the Nurburgring, having taken the title back from a different EV.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a40869346/porsch...
Even on the tech side, imagine torque vectoring by independent wheel motors rather than brake application. Or per-wheel traction control in general. EVs take a mass penalty; that's true, but there are tech advancements possible that are easier to do in an EV than an ICE or hybrid.
Google , Microsoft , Meta… they are software companies, thats what they do. If VW or Stellantis comes to them asking to do their satnav app they wont refuse.
Its easy to list all the bad UI but remember that BMW pioneered the central console wheel back in 2005. Car OEMs generally know better given that they build the actual car , especially the interior
When car OEMs try to copy phones you have disasters such as touchscreens and absence of physical buttons which is a trend that the maniacs over at tesla started and needs to be rolled back ASAP because it is dangerous and bad design
Kinda like Excel for Mac.
I completely disagree. I don’t want to login to my car. I want to plug-in my phone. When my wife is driving I don’t want to have to logout of my car and log her in. I want her to just plug-in her phone.
I have absolutely no interest in maintaining contacts, settings, and credentials in some “CarOS.” I don’t want to worry about someone borrowing my car and seeing messages, nav history, or contacts. I don’t want to worry about a thief seeing those things.
As I said I will not consider a car without CarPlay, and it has nothing at all to do with iMessage. I have one phone and I want to take that phone and plug it into a car. Period.
It’s how you end up with natural selection which produced the central wheel console pioneered by BMW in 2005 and has been the standard for 10 years.
There is a reason why BMW makes cars and Apple makes phones. Right out of the box you cant even charge that brick while listening to music because they killed the 3.5mm jack….at a 1500$ non subsidized price tag.
Apple gets pretty close with custom apps (that I can build myself) and it’s ecosystem. Car manufacturers are probably a decade away from catching up to present day functionality with phones, let alone be good enough to become dominant by “natural selection”.
Modern lives are complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. We have developed elaborate “second brain” systems to make all this easier, and it not being available in something as significant as transportation (I spend a lot of time in my car), is a huge negative. Why explicitly choose that when there’s a solution already? And when the competition has shown no competence in this area of being able to catch-up ever?
Apple is at the very bottom of the list of companies that can claim to be where they are due to "natural selection".
Without the DOJ there is no Apple, they were essentially chapter 7 bankrupt and were saved by DOJ lawsuit against Microsoft.
Further what natural selection compelled Apple to kill the 3.5mm jack? As it stands a phone with a full listing price of 2000$ and you cannot listen to music while charging it. Absolute nonsense. Further nonsense is the elimination of the home button.
I don't want that kind of nonsense in my car. Maybe I'll look repetitive but BMW central wheel console is the kind of no-nonsense that is unbeaten. Physical buttons and toggles are also unbeaten.
Tesla is a projection of what an infotainment system built by Apple would look like, and it's a nightmare. There is a reason why some things are built in Detroit/Stuttgart while some things are built in California.
I currently have two cars. I've had many others in the past.
Car: steering, gas, brakes, environmental controls.
Smartphone: Phone, navigation, music.
For me there is one connection: Bluetooth to play the phone's music through the car's speakers. Besides that, I agree - no reason to connect. But I feel like I'm missing something as there is so much discussion about connecting them.
Now the reason : it became too slow because of software updates? You can just upgrade your phone (which you are gonna do anyway) instead of ditching your whole car!
If it's not open and opensource, it is dead on arrival
The new e-Van shows the strength of brand nostalgia and a pretty great engineering core for building solid cars with a perfect match for the target market.
At the same time, I haven't seen 1 positive take of Volkswagen's terrible new touch UX. They seem truly clueless about how to make physical systems coexist with smart-intefaces. How does something like that get past so many executives ?
Porsche is in a wierd predicament right now. They reached perfection. The cars handle perfectly, they are faster than any human can handle and the classic look practically defines the brand. The sports cars sell themselves faster than they can manufacture. The other big way to make money is SUVs, but Audi is already in that market..... they'd cannibalize each other.
The future for the cornering sports car is bleak. You can't build light cars anymore because electric vehicles are all dead weight. Pure-unassisted-ish steering feels terrible in electric cars and leaning into the weight for handling will make you into a Tesla, and you absolutely don't want to compete with Tesla on their own turf.
I never said Volkswagen is dead, i said German car industry is dying, Volkswagen brand will live by itself and continue to improve
I am worried on the current leadership, not on the cars or the brand
Don't try to twist what i said to promote your agenda, i can see what you are trying to achieve
Last, the problem of EV is specially their interface, nobody wants to drive their car and TOUCH a FLAT SCREEN, you want physical interfaces, and that's where Volkswagen excels at, and where the brand new american EVs fail at, including Tesla, they have a poor UX and a poor tactical/physical feedback, that's the proof of poor build quality, poor taste and lack of experience, which Volkswagen don't have, they just need better software, wich they want to solve by using android/iOS, and that's why i believe the "GERMAN" car industry is dying
I must ask, what is my agenda? I think you'll be very surprised, because my stance on things is likely very different that what you might have assumed.
> their interface
Exactly what I said
https://www.hotcars.com/truth-behind-why-porsche-cayenne-suv...
Almost all of the VW car brands have SUVs in their portfolio. This includes Bentley, Lamborghini and, indeed, Porsche. I would not be surprised to learn that Porsche sells more SUVs than non-SUVs.
I agree Porsche doesn't need this, and their brand is more than fine as it is. But talking about the Teslafication of cars as it relates to being public or not is confusing to me.