Will Volkswagen sell Lamborghini, Porsche, and Bentley to save its spreadsheet?

Ferdinand Piëch walked into a company that was bleeding cash, losing market share, and running out of reasons to exist. It was the early 2000s, and Volkswagen (VW) looked like a candidate for slow, dignified decline. Piëch did something unexpected. He did not just cut costs. He built the Phaeton. He launched the Touareg. He acquired Bentley, Lamborghini, and Bugatti. He paired aggressive restructuring with a growth thesis that repositioned VW from a volume manufacturer into a multi-brand empire that stretched from the Polo to the Veyron. The cost-cutting funded the ambition, while the ambition justified the cost-cutting. And the luxury acquisitions gave the entire group something no efficiency program can manufacture: credibility. Twenty years later, his successors are doing exactly the opposite. VW just sold Everllence, its marine engine and gas turbine division, to Bain Capital for €7.4 billion ($8.45 billion). The unit generated €337 million ($384 million) in operating profit on €4.3 billion ($4.9 billion) in revenue. Healthy, profitable, and structurally insulated from the disruption eating the rest of the automotive industry. Private equity wanted it for those reasons. VW should have kept it for the same ones. The logic is simple on a spreadsheet. VW needs cash for an EV transition that has faced multiple delays. Chinese competitors, led by BYD, are moving faster, cheaper, and with more conviction. So VW sells profitable divisions to fund unprofitable ones. The furniture burns to heat the house. But the Everllence sale may be just the beginning. Financial analysts now expect Volkswagen to consider spinning off or selling Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati. The very brands that Piëch acquired to give VW its strategic identity. The blind spot in VW’s luxury strategy Piëch understood something that the current leadership apparently does not: luxury brands inside a volume group do not just generate margin; they generate gravitational pull. Lamborghini and Bentley gave every engineer in Wolfsburg a reason to believe they were building more than appliances. They gave the dealer network a halo. They gave the brand architecture a ceiling that lifted everything underneath it. Selling them to fund a mass-market EV play that BYD has already won is like a hotel group selling its flagship property to renovate the parking garage. The crown jewel that should concern the Porsche-Piëch family most is the one that bears their name. Porsche AG delivered 279,449 vehicles in 2025, a 10% decline and one of its sharpest annual drops in recent history. In Q1 2026, deliveries fell another 15% to just 60,991 cars. China lost nearly half its Porsche volume in two years, from 79,283 vehicles in 2023 to 41,938 in 2025. Profit collapsed 92.7% to €413 million after €3.9 billion in writedowns in 2025, while the operating return on sales fell to 1.1%. The new leadership’s response is revealing. The stated strategy is “value over volume,” with plans to “grow in higher-margin segments.” Average revenue per vehicle climbed to €121,000 from €117,000. Prices went up. Volume went down. The language tells you everything about the mindset. When a luxury brand talks about squeezing more profit per unit while losing clients in every major market, it has confused arithmetic with strategy. Here is the problem “value over volume” does not solve. The clients who left are not coming back to pay more for less. They left because the Taycan, for all its engineering quality, depreciated faster than any Porsche before it, its initial hype fading within months. They left because the electric Macan arrived in a market where Xiaomi offers devastating performance at a fraction of the price. Every quarter of declining volume is a cohort of clients who experience something else, build loyalty elsewhere, and form habits that exclude Porsche from their next purchase. Those clients could have been retained for life. Instead, they were priced out of a product that no longer earned its price. Structural unraveling under EV pressure The desperation is already producing decisions that would have been unthinkable two years ago. BYD is in talks to take over part of VW’s Transparent Factory in Dresden, the building Piëch built for the Phaeton as a monument to German engineering ambition. VW’s own CEO called sharing factory capacity with Chinese competitors a “clever solution.” Economist Moritz Schularick now describes a full BYD takeover of Volkswagen as probable in the long term. In Q1 2026, BYD delivered 310,389 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) versus Volkswagen Group’s 200,000. When a competitor that outdelivers you moves into your flagship factory, the competitive question has already been answered. The Porsche-Piëch family controls VW through Porsche SE. They are watching two simultaneous crises: VW selling its best assets to fund its weakest strategy, and the Porsche brand hemorrhaging the client base that once made it the most profitable car company on earth. Both crises have the same root cause: the group is optimizing for short-term financial metrics while destroying the long-term value drivers that those metrics are supposed to measure. Piëch would have recognized this instantly. A brand’s balance sheet is a trailing indicator. By the time the numbers reflect the damage, the damage is done. The leading indicators — client acquisition, repurchase intent, the emotional intensity of ownership — are all flashing red at Porsche. “Value over volume” is a confession that volume is gone and the only remaining lever is price. The question the family needs to ask is whether this trajectory leads to a leaner group or a hollowed-out shell that sold everything worth owning to fund a race it already lost. If Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati leave the portfolio, what remains is a volume manufacturer competing against BYD and Stellantis with neither the cost structure nor the brand equity to win. Piëch built an empire by adding brands that created desire. His successors are dismantling it by selling brands that still do. That is the difference between restructuring with conviction and restructuring with a calculator. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of luxury brand strategy firm Équité and Executive Professor of Luxury Strategy at Pepperdine University and NYU.

Will Volkswagen sell Lamborghini, Porsche, and Bentley to save its spreadsheet?

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Will Volkswagen sell Lamborghini, Porsche, and Bentley to save its spreadsheet?

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