Volkswagen shares drop 3.7% after April Fool's name change to Voltswagen

Originally published at: Volkswagen shares drop 3.7% after April Fool's name change to Voltswagen | Boing Boing

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Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It’s not April 1 yet!

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It looks to me like even after this drop their stock price is up over where it was prior to the rumors coming out earlier in the week, so I’d say their strategy worked very well.

I also thought it pretty naive that many widely read news-ish sites like this one printed the rumored name change as fact, when those that actually looked into it were very skeptical of the name change from the beginning. Major companies don’t change their name without, among other things, securing rights to the URL for their new name!

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Just like VW, they knew it would get clicks. That’s all that matters these days.

Also, I am now sad that this has been blown up. I was really hoping this would be the next Mr Potatohead.

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Wall Street just can’t take a joke.

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It is in eastern Asia and Oceania!

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Come again?

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Correlation, though, is still not causation.

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It’s amusing to see just how many hot takes there are out there about how bad/dumb/irresponsible VW was for this. By all the people who were taken in by the announcement, and now can’t bring themselves to admit it.

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It wasn’t that long ago that confusion reigned when IHOP seemed to change its name to IHOB.

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It wasn’t yesterday when this hit the news, however.

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Yes, a major auto manufacturer leading everyone to believe this name change would herald the end of their combustion products and usher in a wonderful new world of renewable-energy offerings.

Ha Ha !! Man, they totally had us fooled. Bravo!

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Well, Volkswagen is putting a lot of resources and effort into moving to electric vehicles. As are more than a few other big traditional automakers. Once they get things rolling, they will eat Tesla alive. (I hope SpaceX won’t be harmed by that.)

I can get behind that. And spend a few dollars on a url/trademark to retake sell it.

Jury seems hung on that.

Speaking of April Fools’, it’s still the general consensus that the health of the stock market does not accurately reflect the health of the economy, right?

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Looks like someone earned an unpaid vacation.

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There’s an very important factor necessary for an April Fool’s Joke to be acceptable. It has to be on April 1st.

Maybe they intended it to be a rapid media campaign to bring about a quick commercial victory. A Blitzmedienkrieg, perhaps, but it backfired because of poor media emissions practices.

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It’s always April 1st somewhere.

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Just watched a short rundown on the “petit colon” ad (happened to be made by Bild Zeitung of all bad outlets, but even then), and reading the presented user reactions there, I was ready to call it bullocks when one reaction claimed “the first letters of the slogan ‘der neue Golf’ give you the N word”—until the snippet shown demonstrated that in fact, VW thought it a good idea to let the letters N, E, G, E. R fade in first.

So now I’m really angry and disappointed and want to share my rage (oh wait the window is open! … back). BUT I fail to deduce, from the presented data (a meandering curve in a chart whose Y-Axis doesn’t start at zero, as usual in financial charts—add arbitrary left and right endpoints in time and you can essentially make any curve look dramatic or irrelevant. Trump liked to do this, but it’s standard practice with bonkers) that the drop is in any way associated with the malfunctioning April Fool’s prank; if anything, it seems to predate its publication and then go on for quite some while (if the marker is any indication). It’s hard to tell from the low resolution JPG.

One would be inclined to say the title is clickbait, but a careful reading (“shares drop (any length of time) after event (and could’ve been falling for a while even before)”) yields nothing. Journalists, right?

I also have to wonder why the (in this scale seemingly) HUGE GAINS in VW stock value that the world witnessed during the TRULY HISTORIC PERIOD between 29th and 31st have not been attributed to the announced-then-cancelled change of name.

The other thing I do not quite get is why people are jumping on this. I do understand precedents like Dieselgate and Petit Colon make people dislike the brand, but among us, what’s so outrageous / hilarious / worthy of mention that Volkswagen sounds a bit like Voltswagen? It’s not even very funny.

should we be discharged now…