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VW makes $23K on every Porsche sold, more than Bentley or Lamborghini

It's a good time to be in the luxury car business. In Volkswagen Group's financial report for the 2013 fiscal year, it is revealed that that Porsche enjoyed an operating margin of 18 percent. That means the Stuttgart brand made on average about $23,200 per car sold, according to BusinessWeek. Bentley wasn't far behind, and Audi (which was combined with Lamborghini) posted a 10.1 percent margin. This compares to only around 2.9 percent for the Volkswagen brand.
"Luxury brands are on fire," said Dave Sullivan, an industry analyst at AutoPacific. He said that the average profit margin is between six and eight percent. Brands like Porsche and Bentley have the benefit of competing in rarefied markets. Buyers looking at one their vehicles have fewer models to shop against and don't care as much about price. They can also charge more for options, which further boosts income, according to BusinessWeek.
In a way, we should be more impressed by the continued success from Audi. Its models generally have direct competitors in every segment from the other premium automakers. Plus, their buyers aren't the captains of industry who are shopping for a Bentley. Still, the Four Rings is leading rivals in sales so far this year.

Tour Lamborghini museum with Google Street View

If you find yourself in northern Italy with some spare time on your hands, we could think of few places better to spend it than the Lamborghini Museum in Sant'Agata. The 16,000-square-foot facility houses what is surely the most magnificent collections of Raging Bulls in the world on two levels of glassed-in floorspace. But if your travel plans won't be taking you to Bologna, Lamborghini has teamed up with Google to provide the next best thing.
Now all you've got to do to get a closer look at the Lamborghini Museum is open another tab in your web browser and head over to Google Maps (or fire up the Google Maps app on your smartphone or tablet) to see the whole museum in Street View. There you'll find everything from production models like the Miura, Countach, Diablo and Murcielago to limited-production rarities like the Reventon and Sesto Elemento, prototypes like the Estoque and Zagato Canto, a Gallardo highway patrol car and a handful of Lamborghini-powered F1 cars, like Nicola Larini's 1991 Modena 291.
You can even get into a few of them, which the museum's curators aren't likely to let you do in person. So whether you're at home, at the office or in Sant'Agata Bolognese, it's there for you to check out on Google Street View. Short of that, you can scope out a few screen shots in the gallery above and the details in the press release below.

We visit the Lamborghini Museum at company HQ in Sant'Agata

Last week, Lamborghini invited us to stop by its Sant'Agata Bolognese headquarters to have a look around the factory and pick up a few technical tidbits about its new Huracán LP 610-4. It won't surprise you to learn this, but Lambo's foyer is pretty rad.
Rather than front its offices and factory with a gift shop and a reception desk, Lamborghini puts its amazing heritage on full display by offering up the corporate museum as a first impression to visitors. We had coffee in the morning and lunch after the press conference in this space, with stunning Italian concept cars and production models serving as an impressive backdrop to it all. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to share the Lamborghini collection with exotic-car crazed Autoblog readers (you know who you are), we did our best to capture everything we saw in the gallery here.
With some variation, the museum's two floors are separated by vintage: older models downstairs and newer up. When you walk through the front door, you're flanked by two of the coolest Lamborghinis in the marque's impressive history: a 350 GT to the left and a perfectly green Countach LP 400 on the right. Perhaps our favorite car in the whole joint, the Countach's Bertone body is still almost impossible to believe. Up close, we're reminded how design-driven this car is; the seats are so far inboard from the scissor doors that it's difficult to imagine that engineers ever agreed that the shape was a feasible one for production or actual driving.