But there’s more to this than meets the eye. Kingmaker in all of this, VW’s chief executive Bernd Pischetsrieder is manifestly delighted that some of the hostility has evaporated, but, interestingly, he hasn’t committed himself to any discussion pertaining to the structure of the new operation. Meaning that we might yet still see Scania effectively taking over MAN. A further curveball arrives in the form of HVB suggesting that VW could up its stake in MAN to around 30 per cent.

This view seems to be echoed by Cheuvreux Nordic analyst David Hallden, who regards Investor AB – currently Scania’s second largest shareholder – as retaining a stake in the new business.

This is going to provoke some interesting discussions some way down the road. Scania and MAN may compete in the same market sector, but they boast radically different management styles and – even more fundamentally – whilst MAN has shown itself to be open to alliances and components swaps – Scania is avowedly verticalised.

We’re not sure how this lot is going to pan out. Yesterday, Pischetsrieder said that he would allow a takeover of Scania by MAN if that seemed the best way to proceed. However, he also said that there could be hostile moves if three-way talks – over the next four weeks -were not successful, but he would not say what role VW would play in renewed hostile moves.

It would be a very naive to think that a merger of this significance – and complexity – would settle down in the short term. Whatever happens, the notion of a ‘Merger of Equals’ has been shown to be nonsense. A merger is a takeover – and to the victor go the spoils. Who the victor will be in all of this is clear – it’s VW – but quite who the real loser will turn out to be – that’s a calculation that is going to take some time to work out.