Five senior members of Volkswagen’s supervisory board are meeting Wednesday to discuss the future for the automaker after stock prices have plummeted and the company has publicly acknowledged it cheated worldwide emissions tests, the BBC reported.
The smaller Wednesday meeting is ahead of a regularly scheduled full board meeting Friday, where members are expected to discuss the contract extension to 2018 for CEO Martin Winterkorn. According to reports, Winterkorn’s future may be decided before Friday’s meeting.
Winterkorn issued a video statement in German on Tuesday apologizing for the scandal, but stopped short from resigning from the top VW post. The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported that Winterkorn would be replaced this week.
Winterkorn took over as CEO of Volkswagen in 2007, two years before the automaker included software in its diesel cars to run cleaner in “testing modes” than they do on the road. An independent investigation uncovered the cars polluted up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide than allowable by law.
Before the scandal broke, Winterkorn was noted to be fastidious about his cars; a video of the CEO taking minute measurements of a Hyundai in 2011 at the Frankfurt Auto Show has surged in popularity in the past week.
In two days following the scandal, Volkswagen has lost billions of its value in a stock free-fall. The stock inched up higher on Wednesday, but far from its five-day peak and more than 50 percent lower than its 52-week high.
And now we return you to “The Truth About Volkswagen”.
“Welcome back, my friends
To the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside, come inside”
I liked “Pictures at an Exhibition” best.
You just know that Sergio The Great is now plotting a NEW merger target, VW, with HIM at the helm. If VW’s share price continues plunging, STG will be able to do it with corporate pocket change. He is the master opportunist and would love to stick it to Piech (still on the board, I think) for having the audacity (Audiacity?) to try to get Alfa. A merger of these two would create goodwill here in the U.S. (Feds won’t want to penalize the newly combined company too severely to save Chrysler jobs in the here.). It creates an automotive juggernaut. Gives STG the economies of scale he has been begging for, and provides the huge payout to him that he is also seeking. VW gets to save face globally, and finally gains a decent share of the U.S. market, with Jeep and RAM trucks.
Yeah, not going to happen. Only 9.3% of VW stock is up for grabs. In order to takeout VW, Sergio would have to convince Porsche, Lower Saxony, and Qatar Holdings that he is the man for the job. Good luck with that.
VW would digest FCA and sh!t out the pieces that it didn’t absorb.
Scoff if you want, but it’s the headline story in The Street, and it turns out Piech was in discussion with the Agnelli’s about a merger with FCA prior to his ouster.
If FCA were to merge with VW, it would be a cash out move for the Agnelli’s and Sergio wouldn’t be running the show. It would be even more difficult to get control of VW than GM.
If Piech comes back this is going to be a beautiful piece of work straight out of The Prince.
“Manipulated in Germany” or “Vorsprung durch cheating” – take you pick what describes VW best. Still, despite the cheating, one can also say that it such a waste to disregard turbo diesel technology. Particularly VW’s 2 liter turbo diesels are such fine examples of combining hp, torque and fuel efficiency, especially when mated to an automatic gearbox, giving the sort of performance Americans, less familiar with manual shift, would have liked.
Probably a good time to start thinking about buying some shares of VW stock. The company is not going anywhere and these stock prices will come back to a baseline.
Who can vee throw unda da Volkswagen microbus iz zee discussion today…
Looks like it will be Winterkorn and his double breasted suit.
Winterkorn is out. It is all over the news.
He is out, is only a matter of time before the announcement, you can expect other heads to roll in engineering, QC etc.
Yeah hey, long time B&B’ers…did you notice the photo credit for this story? A blast from the past. Mr. BS himself.
As Yogi Berra (RIP) once said “you can see a lot just by looking.”