In Volkswagen’s Move To Go Electric Lamborghini And Bugatti Might Get The Axe

In a report Reuters published citing anonymous sources from within Volkswagen, the company is evaluating the future of its high-performance brands Lamborghini and Bugatti. According to the report, Volkswagen’s desire to electrify its fleet has executives wondering whether it’s worth the effort to design an electric platform for these low volume cars.

Another brand that is on the chopping board is Ducati. The high-performance motorbike brand is famous for embarrassing multimillion-dollar hypercars off the line. Last year Ducati sold 53,00 superbikes but, this number still was not enough to save it from the restructuring chatter.

The fate of the three brands is currently unclear but according to the executives Reuters spoke to, everything from restructuring, to complete sell of these brands is being considered.

However, this is not the first time we heard these rumors. A few weeks back reports started to circulate saying Volkswagen is considering selling its Bugatti hypercar brand to Rimac. In the transaction, Rimac would take Bugatti under its name and VW would get a 49 percent stake in the combined company.

Rimac is the all-electric hypercar manufacturer out of Croatia. Volkswagen currently holds a 15% stake in the company through its Porche subsidiary. And if the deal goes through it will mean yet another expansion for VW’s plans to electrify its fleet.

As for Lamborghini, the details of how it will be restructured or to what company it will be sold is yet unclear. But the company faces an onslaught of new competition from electric car brands Tesla and Lucid.

Tesla recently announced the plaid version of its Model S sedan. This is a 4 door family sedan that does 0 to 60 in under 2 seconds, has 200 miles per hour top speed, and does the quarter-mile in less than 9 seconds. And all for $140,000, a fair price for supercars.

On top of this, the prototype was able to finish a lap in the Laguna Seca raceway in 1:30:3. this is almost equal to the Lamborghini Hurucan Performante which finished a lap in 1:30:1. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk says they will get the number down to 1:27 by the time the car launches towards the end of 2021.

If this comes to be true, Lamborghini will have a hard time justifying the several hundred thousand dollars it asks for its cars. And given this reality, Volkswagen’s decision to revaluate its Lamborghini future is understandable.

So what do you think? Should Volkswagen keep its high-performance brands just for the heritage? Or should the company offload its Lamborghini and Bugatti subsidiaries and move to an all-electric future? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.

For more information checkout: How the VW ID.4 undercut the Tesla Model Y price Also see Tesla’s battery breakthroughs that enabled the crazy performance of the plaid Model S.

Tinsae Aregay has been following Tesla and The evolution of the EV space on a daily basis for several years. He covers everything about Tesla from the cars to Elon Musk, the energy business, and autonomy. Follow Tinsae on Twitter at @TinsaeAregay for daily Tesla news.