Porsche to pull Boxster production from Magna over Opel stake?

After a great deal of international haggling, Magna ended up winning the competition for Opel. One of the many questions to be answered now is: How will the deal affect Magna's engineering and assembly business? Even as companies like VW and BMW have said they would be looking closely at working with Magna if it owned Opel, Magna head Frank Stronach must have been convinced he could keep his clients happy.

That hasn't happened yet, and now Porsche is saying it might take future production away from Magna. The Stuttgart firm contracted Magna to build the next Boxster and Cayman in 2013 in Austria, but now it's worried that its costs and engineering might end up in the wrong hands if left with Magna.

Porsche's alternatives would be to keep Boxster production in-house at Zuffenhausen, where the cars are currently made, or to contract with Karmann, which just earned a chunk of VW's electric car business. The alternatives for Magna, though, aren't so clear – with BMW and VW also casting wary eyes, does it continue with the carmaker adventure at the risk of losing the business that got it to the top in the first place?

[Source: Autoweek]