> Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is a British luxury automobile maker which has operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW AG since 2003
...
> The Rolls-Royce Motor Cars subsidiary of BMW AG has no direct relationship to Rolls-Royce-branded vehicles produced before 2003, other than having briefly supplied components and engines. The Bentley Motors Limited subsidiary of Volkswagen AG is the direct successor to Rolls-Royce Motors and various other predecessor entities that produced Rolls-Royce and Bentley branded cars between the foundation of each company and 2003, when the BMW-controlled entity started producing cars under the Rolls-Royce brand.
The "actual" Rolls-Royce company with a lineage going back to the beginning of the brand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings ) has exited the car business, and nowadays makes jet engines, gas turbines, and nuclear reactors.
There's always the guy who put a Rolls-Royce Meteor V-12 aircraft engine into a road car. The city council decided it was a Rolls-Royce and let him register it that way, whereupon he attached a Rolls-Royce grille and got himself sued for trademark infringement:
VW's history with corporate structure and brands is a clusterfuck in general, haha, the ownership structure between Volkswagen AG, Porsche SE and Porsche AG is pretty convoluted, then you add other VW-owned brands: Audi which has Lamborghini, Ducati, and Bentley as subsidiaries, Bentley itself has been owner and subsidiary of Rolls-Royce through its history, ending up owning the brand for cars lately.
If anyone has ever seen a timeline diagram of their corporate structure I'd be very interested to see, just to get a sense of how much more of a clusterfuck it is than the tidbits I know about.
Volkswagen group has been said to have slated the sell-off of Ferdinand Piëch's "favorite toy" since his death in 2019. . . . The complicated corporate ownership structure of Bugatti-Rimac places Rimac Group as the majority stakeholder of the endeavor with 55 percent of the control. Volkswagen-owned Porsche retains the other 45 percent of ownership. Above Rimac Group sits another number of shareholders, beginning with CEO Mate Rimac who controls 37 percent of the company. Porsche controls 24 percent of Rimac Group, Hyundai has 12 percent, and "other investors" amass the remaining 27 percent.
> ... just to get a sense of how much more of a clusterfuck it is than the tidbits I know about.
And it all goes back to the Porsche and Piech families, which still own a majority share in VW.
But to me the most fascinating of them all is when Porsche tried a short-squeeze on VW stocks to both acquire VW and make countless billions in the process but that failed due to the... 2008 financial crisis. Without the crisis hitting, Porsche (the company, not the family) was acquiring VW.
Their short squeeze failed and Porsche lost an insane amount of money on their temporarily worthless VW stocks (the VW stock lost 75% of its value between 2008 and 2009, something insane like that) and then... VW had to rescue Porsche by acquiring Porsche.
But then as of late Porsche spun off out of VW again.
It's mindboggling stuff.
The best description I've read about Porsche (the company) is: "The hedge fund that happened to also sell cars".
> Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is a British luxury automobile maker which has operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW AG since 2003
...
> The Rolls-Royce Motor Cars subsidiary of BMW AG has no direct relationship to Rolls-Royce-branded vehicles produced before 2003, other than having briefly supplied components and engines. The Bentley Motors Limited subsidiary of Volkswagen AG is the direct successor to Rolls-Royce Motors and various other predecessor entities that produced Rolls-Royce and Bentley branded cars between the foundation of each company and 2003, when the BMW-controlled entity started producing cars under the Rolls-Royce brand.
The "actual" Rolls-Royce company with a lineage going back to the beginning of the brand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings ) has exited the car business, and nowadays makes jet engines, gas turbines, and nuclear reactors.