VW: Everyday car
Audi: Luxury sports car
Bentley: Ultra luxury car
Porsche: High-performance sports car
As others have noted, you stick with your brand image. Bentley doesn’t make race cars, for example.
Bentley was originally a sports car brand, before RR bought them and just stuck the badge on Rolls-Royce chassis, with the occasional flex at performance likely the Bentley Turbo. VW has tried to bring back some of that sporting image, so there have been race car versions of the Continental GT.
Thanks for the info. I should have chosen a more accurate example.
I think a more pertinent question would be why do VW and Mercedes (and Opel, for that matter) not offer a motorcycle under one of their numerous brands? BMW does under its own brand and it has always been a big success. I think I read somewhere that VW or the VAG even bought a stake in Moto Guzzi but they did not go along that road after all. Still I wonder why.
It not only has not hurt their brand image, they developed an aura of reliability out of the fact that their taxis lasted for ages. Taxis have helped Mercedes’ image. In Germany most taxis are still Mercedes, though not with such an overwhelming market share as they used to have.
VWAG owns Ducati, and Mercedes-Benz owns a stake in MV Agusta. Moto Guzzi has no automotive manufacturer relationship - they’re owned by Piaggio, (most famous for Vespa).
I’ll admit, I always wanted a Honda S2000 to park next to my CBR600RR when I had it.
Because it wouldn’t be profitable.
Outside parts of Asia, the motorcycle market is pretty small. In Europe, 15 million cars are sold every year versus 1 million motorcycles (and that includes scooters and mopeds). Let’s say VAG starts making bikes and captures 10% of the market. That’s a huge stretch, given that Honda has about 20% of the European bike market after 60 years, but still. That means VAG sells 100,000 bikes, likely priced around the same as the Up!, which itself sells a little less than 100,000 units in Europe per year.
In practice, your bikes are going to be priced much lower, because who’s going to buy a bike from someone that hasn’t built them before when they can have a Honda or Kawasaki or Aprilia? Don’t even think about getting into brand-snob bike territory; nobody is going to consider a start-up as an alternative to a Ducati, Harley, Triumph or BMW.
Now, the Up! uses the same NSF platform that all of VAG’s city cars are based on, and other than the body, most of the bits are straight out of the VW/Skoda parts bin. So it doesn’t cost much more to develop and build than any other model. And of course, anyone who can design, develop or build a Golf can do the same with an Up!
Compare that to the bikes. You can’t use many parts in motorcycles that you do in cars, because everything is smaller. It’s not like you can just turn the inline four-cylinder engine from a hatchback into a two-cylinder bike engine; bikes have to rev much higher and require far less torque. The instrument gauges are smaller, the seats are completely different, the wheels and tyres are different, the gearboxes are different, and the exhausts are much shorter. Even the brake callipers can’t be shared. I can’t think of anything other than maybe small electrical components and fasteners that you could share between a car and a bike. Few if any of your employees are bike engineers, so you have to lure them away from other bike manufacturers at great expense, or train them from the ground up.
But let’s say you build a bike and you can take a loss on it for a while until you establish market share and credibility. Where are you going to sell it? Your existing dealer network is specifically for cars. Their employees don’t know anything about bikes, and aside from a very few metropolitan dealers with shared facilities, they won’t be able to repair them. So you have to build an entirely new dealer network to sell your entirely new product.
Now, you might say all the same things hold true for Bugatti: VW had to build out the company from scratch, just to sell a tiny number of hypercars. The difference is (1) Veyrons and Chirons sell for millions, so they don’t cut into your import quotas and they are vastly more profitable per unit; (2) the R&D that goes into your pointless hypercar project trickles down into your mass-market products, so you can now sell a Golf R with carbon-ceramic brakes and theoretically sell more; (3) Bugattis are halo cars that in theory make the rest of your range a bit more special.
Obviously, none of this is insuperable, and if Ferdinand Piech’s retirement vanity project was to launch VW as a motorcycle manufacturer, he probably could have done it. But I doubt it would have made the company any money.
Just as as an interesting side note, as I understand it Honda did pretty much that, but in the opposite direction, when they first started selling cars in the US. By the late 1960s Honda was pretty well established here as a motorcycle company. When they first started selling cars here in the early 1970s they initially sold them through their existing motorcycle dealerships for the first few years until they could get their car specific dealerships established. Imagine going to a motorcycle dealer to test drive the new '73 Civic.
Not for the Veyron. VW famously lost millions on each one they sold. They are very much just a halo vehicle (a point you did make as well). They have said that the Chiron won’t lose money but that sounds a long way away from claiming they’ll make a sound profit.
In general it’s proved tricky to make money on exotic car brands, as indicated by how often the famous ones which have been around continuously (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin etc whereas Bugatti is ~20 yr old revival by VW of a defunct brand) have shifted ownership. Ferrari now is a standalone company with reasonable finances. However Formula 1 team sponsorship and logo licensing revenue is much more significant, especially as % of profit, than for any mass market car company. It’s not really the same business.
And based on some idea of uniqueness, which is why it’s not exactly right to call Bentley ‘ultra luxury’ and Porsche ‘high performance sports car’ as if entirely separate. It’s more complicated than that: there are very high performance, although big, Bentley’s and a majority of Porsche’s global sales are now sporty SUV’s not sports cars. But both existing is viable if there’s something, albeit intangible, that’s unique about each. Otherwise it wouldn’t work, and no guarantee it always will. And Porsche’s sales are nearly 30 times Bentley’s so no question how they rank in importance within VW. The other thing about niche brands in big companies is that the worst case is usually them taking up too much management time and energy, rather than losing huge amounts of money for a big car company.