Walk into a Lamborghini dealership in Dubai and spend £300,000 on a Huracán. Then walk into the Bentley dealership next door and spend £250,000 on a Continental GT. Then visit the Bugatti atelier and discuss a Chiron commission at £3 million.
You have just given the same family three cheques.
The Porsche and Piëch families — through a holding structure of considerable complexity involving Porsche SE, Volkswagen AG, and a series of subsidiary relationships that corporate lawyers find genuinely interesting — control the Volkswagen Group. And the Volkswagen Group owns Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Audi, Porsche, and until recently, Ducati.
The ultra-luxury automotive market, which presents itself to buyers as a landscape of distinct and competing marques with independent philosophies and separate engineering traditions, is, at the ownership level, substantially consolidated under one set of shareholders.
What consolidation does to the product
The question that matters to a buyer is not who owns the shares. It is whether the ownership structure affects the vehicle.
The honest answer is: sometimes, and in ways that are not uniformly negative.
Platform sharing within the VW Group is real. The Bentley Continental GT and the Porsche Panamera share an architecture. The Lamborghini Urus shares a platform with the Audi Q7, the Porsche Cayenne, and the Bentley Bentayga. The buyer who pays £200,000 for an Urus and £75,000 for a Cayenne is driving vehicles whose fundamental engineering was developed together and whose component sharing is extensive.
This is not secret. It is also not, in the Urus’s case, a product flaw. The Urus is a better vehicle for having access to the Group’s engineering resources than it would be if Lamborghini had developed an SUV platform independently. The outcome — in performance, refinement, and reliability — benefits from the scale that group ownership provides.
Bugatti is the interesting case. The Chiron’s W16 engine is genuinely Bugatti’s own — developed within the brand rather than shared from a group parts bin. The vehicle’s engineering is distinct in ways that justify its price premium in engineering terms rather than merely in brand terms. Bugatti within the VW Group has, largely, been allowed to be Bugatti.
Bentley, similarly, retains sufficient engineering independence that its vehicles are not Audis in evening dress. The W12 engine that powers the Continental GT is a Bentley engine. The development philosophy is distinct.
What the buyer should actually think about
The consolidation of ultra-luxury automotive brands under group ownership is neither the scandal that brand purists suggest nor the irrelevance that group marketing implies. It is a structural reality with specific implications that vary by marque and by the specific vehicle being purchased.
The buyer who understands which elements of their vehicle are genuinely brand-specific and which are shared group assets is making a more informed decision than the buyer who takes the brand mythology at face value.
The Lamborghini badge on an Urus does not change what the Urus is. It is a magnificent, absurd, entirely entertaining vehicle that happens to share its bones with several less expensive vehicles. Whether that matters depends entirely on what the buyer values.
For some principals, it matters considerably. For others, the vehicle’s performance and the badge on its nose are the complete set of relevant variables.
Neither position is wrong.
Both should be informed.
Curated by: Hype Luxury
