Tall tale: VW to produce prime Porker?

Newswheel staff :: 11 October 2005 :: Filed under Porsche, Porsche Panamera, Volkswagen, Europe & UK, US

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In which our hero Porsche AG farms out production of the upcoming Panamera to lazy old VW and we exclusively reveal what the new four-door coupe definitely will not look like…

The story so far
Following the intriguing news last month that Porsche has secured a large minority stake in stumbling goliath VW, comes a report that VW itself will lend a hand with the German sportscar maker’s next big project – the Panamera four-door coupe.

According to German website n-tv.de, VW will be responsible for the chassis and paintjob of this prime new Porker. Quite how this squares with Porsche’s previous announcement that the Panamera will built and developed using Porsche’s own resources, that the company had “no plans for a joint venture with another car maker” and that the firm’s Leipzig facility (currently home to the Cayenne SUV and Carrera GT supercar) was the favoured manufacturing venue, we dare not speculate.

Of course, any suggestion of a joint venture with VW will be enough to get old school Porschophiles all-over antsy. After all, the most recent result of such an alliance was the financially successful but painfully un-Porsche-like Cayenne SUV. Surely, the Panamera won’t be another rebodied version of the nose-heavy, front-engined  VW Phaeton saloon (Bentley Continental GT, anyone?)…

Meanwhile…
At risk of all-round copyright wrath, here’s Newswheel’s round-up of the micro-industry of computer-generated speculation that the Panamera has patronised. For the record, then, this is what the Panamera definitely won’t look like:

Oh, good lord, no…

Crumbs…

Say it ain’t so…

Mostly awful, but we enjoyed the slug balancer…

The best of a bad bunch?

And finally…
The only official indication of the styling of the new car comes courtesy of this official sketch:
 

Linkage:
n-tv.de story (German)