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VW Group to split brands under four holding companies

The Volkswagen Group is planning a tremendous shift in its internal structure that will decentralize operations by splitting its 12 brands into four different holding companies. Here's the breakdown. Things will be split logically, considering the inter-sharing of parts, platforms, and engines. The Volkswagen brand, Seat, and Skoda make up a passenger vehicle division led by former BMW man Herbert Diess. Audi, which is tightly intertwined with Lamborghini and motorcycle manufacturer Ducati, will be managed by current Audi exec Rupert Stadler. Porsche and Bentley, which are already quite close, will be joined by Bugatti and run by Matthias Mueller. Finally, a commercial vehicles division will include Volkswagen Commercial, Scania, and Man. Former Daimler exec Andreas Renschler will take care of the big vehicles. The massive move, according to Automotive News Europe, is part of an internal VAG effort to move away from the structure established by ousted Chairman Ferdinand Piech, who favored a compact, but highly centralized, management structure to oversee the independent actions of the company's brands. Criticism of Piech's arrangement stemmed from the company's slow responses to changes in the market, ANE reports. The new structure should make for a more efficient, streamlined company that's better able to make crucial decisions. What are your thoughts? Should VAG decentralize, or did Piech have the right idea? Have your say in Comments.

Lamborghini goes from carbon fiber to carbon neutral [w/video]

Draw up a list in your mind of automakers striving to "save the environment," and you might be forgiven for not ranking Lamborghini very high on impressions alone. After all, it only makes supercars with double-digit cylinder counts, displacing over 5.0 liters, and producing in excess of 600 horsepower. Hardly what you'd characterize as "green" modes of transportation, then. And though it recently showed a hybrid sports car concept, it has opted next to build an SUV instead. However the Raging Bull marque is out to rehabilitate its image by changing the reality of its carbon footprint. It's just not about to do so by watering down the supercars for which it is known. "We are not here to please a single customer. We are here to pass this territory unharmed to the next generation." – Lamborghini CEO, Stephan Winkelmann This week the Italian automaker officially opened its new Trigeneration Plant – which is not, lest you think otherwise, an assembly facility spanning multiple eras of production. It's a new power plant, built on the site of the company's headquarters in Sant'Agata Bolognese, that will generate its electricity, heating, and cooling, all from the same source of natural gas. The plant has an installed (potential) capacity of 1.2 megawatts, and will (practically speaking) be capable of generating over 25,000 MWh every year. That'd be enough to power all the houses in Sant'Agata, the otherwise sleepy town which Lamborghini shares with about 7,000 residents. The clean-burning facility is estimated to cut out 820 tons of CO2 every year, and by 2017 is slated to run on biofuel to raise that figure to a claimed 5,600 tons per year. The question is, who cares? Sure, people buying EVs and free-range chickens want to be assured that their buying habits fit their environmental conscience, but does the average Lamborghini buyer really care if their new supercar came from an environmentally friendly factory? "If we are going to do the things only because of the importance first thing for the customer, we would not be here anymore," Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann told us during roundtable discussion at the opening of the Trigeneration Plant. "We are not here to please a single customer. We are here to pass this territory unharmed to the next generation." "It would be ridiculous if you would say we are going to save the world.

Lamborghini Huracan races Su-30 jet in Russia

We've seen it time and time again, but we never seem to get tired of it. We are referring, of course, to races between supercars and fighter jets. The time-honored tradition has seen a Lamborghini Reventón take on a Panavia Tornado, an SRT Viper line up alongside an F-16, even a Red Bull F1 car tackle an F/A-18 Hornet. But now it's time for the new Lamborghini Huracán to take its turn. And since this contest takes place in Russia, its rival is none other than the Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker-C, the two-seat version of the earlier Su-27 and one of the most advanced aircraft to come out of the Soviet Union.
Now there are, of course, many ways to set up a race between car and jet, but for this one, the organizers had the competitors line up on the runway, accelerate past a marker (at which point the jet is already in the air), turn around and return. We'll let you watch the video for yourself to see which won, but either way, there can be little question that the Su-30 and the latest Lamborghini are two of the most formidable performance machines ever devised.