{"id":12459,"date":"2009-05-18T13:14:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T20:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/?p=12459"},"modified":"2009-05-18T15:21:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T22:21:48","slug":"automobile-international-ferdinand-piech-the-godfather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/?p=12459","title":{"rendered":"Automobile International &#8211; Ferdinand Piech: The Godfather"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Hakan Samuelsson thought he had it all figured out. In 2006, the CEO of German commercial truck manufacturer MAN schemed to take over his former employer and Swedish rival, Scania. He had the banks behind him. VW owned 30 percent of Scania; they had to agree to the takeover. And why not? Volkswagen had no use for Scania, as VW\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commercial truck division only operates in South America. So\u00c2\u00a0Hakan Samuelsson\u00c2\u00a0made a deal with Bernd Pischetsrieder, then head of Volkswagen.\u00c2\u00a0Unfortunately\u00c2\u00a0for Mr. Samuelsson, he talked to the wrong guy.\u00c2\u00a0Ferdinand Piech, the\u00c2\u00a0person pulling the strings over in Wolfsburg, had different plans . . .<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Before we get to what happened, let\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs take a small detour and look at where Piech\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs story began.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">In fact, let\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs begin with his grandfather Ferdinand Porsche&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thetruthaboutcars.com\/editorial-ferdinand-piech-the-godfather-pt-1\/\" target=\"_blank\">Details<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<center>[ad#cor1]<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hakan Samuelsson thought he had it all figured out. In 2006, the CEO of German commercial truck manufacturer MAN schemed to take over his former employer and Swedish rival, Scania. He had the banks behind him. VW owned 30 percent of Scania; they had to agree to the takeover. And why not? Volkswagen had no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,7,23,24,25,67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auto-misc","category-automobile","category-new-automobile-products-tests","category-rally-car","category-sports-car","category-trucks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12459"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12461,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459\/revisions\/12461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}