Toyota is getting frisky. Per a press release, Toyota U.S.A. reports brisk sales of the game-changing Prius c compact hybrid. Then, TMS goes on to say that “In its first three days on the market, it sold 1,201 units, making it one Toyota’s fastest-selling vehicles and eclipsing Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf sales for the entire month of February.” (Read More…)

Yesterday, we could report that the fickle Fisker that embarrassingly broke down in Consumer Reports’ driveway, received a new battery, under warranty. Now we hear that it was no breakdown. The Fisker Karma shut itself down intentionally to prevent bigger damage. (Read More…)

A lover of a former Volkswagen labor leader has been charged for aiding in breach of trust over her role in a bribery scandal, Focus Magazin reports. The scandal had rocked Volkswagen, destroyed the image of the German metalworker union IG Metall, and aided in toppling the center-left government of Gerhard Schröder in 2005.

According to prosecutors in Braunschweig, a 47-year-old woman from Brazil received €250,000 euros ($327,000) under sham contracts between 2002 and 2005. It is also alleged that she billed Volkswagen for travel costs and language courses, totaling €100,000 ($130,000.) The woman was not identified, but anybody who has been close to the upper echelons of Volkswagen in those days knows that it can’t be anyone else than the buxom Brazilian Adriana Barros. (Read More…)

You already have the bad news about February car sales in Europe. How did individual cars fare? JATO Dynamics provides us with a list of Europe’s Top Ten in February. With two exceptions, they are all down, some are way down. One exception creates great happiness in a suburb of Detroit. (Read More…)

Daimler has attracted the wrath of Wikipedia. An anonymous Wikipedia editor had “corrected” a harmless entry about Daimler’s lobbying activities. The edit was caught. The IP address was traced back to “a server of Daimler AG,” writes Der Spiegel.  All hell broke loose. (Read More…)

The other day, I walk (don’t ask why and what for) through Tokyo’s red-light district, known to connoisseurs as Kabukicho, and I spot some HUMMERs curbside. HUMMERs are not new to the neighborhood. In Japan, HUMMERs used to be popular with certain groups, known as the Yakuza, who also frequent Kabukicho.

However, they had H2s, not the HUMMERs I saw. (Read More…)

Chrysler’s owner Fiat is in trouble. Fiat has a (declining) market share of 28.3 percent in its home market Italy, a market that had tanked 19 percent in February, and 18 percent in the first two months of the year. Fiat’s sales in Italy, down 20 percent in February, slowed more than the floundering market. Fiat’s southern exposure to the ailing parts of Europe is disproportional. Fiat’s top executives will now have an emergency meeting with Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti, Reuters reports. Possibly on the agenda: A closure of another Italian factory, and a cutback on investments in Italy. (Read More…)

Now, it is beginning to hurt: The European new car market crashed in February. According to data released by the European manufacturers’ association ACEA, new car sales were down 9.7 percent in February. Two months into the year, car sales in the EU are down 8.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. (Read More…)

Chinese media has written for a while that Volkswagen and its Shanghai joint venture with SAIC will do a new “Chinese” brand called “Tianyue” by the Chinese, or “Tantus” by the longnoses. Only Carnewschina did some research and tells us what those names really mean. Careful, do not read on if you are offended by “mature” content, or could be fired for reading such. (Read More…)

Merriam-Webster Definition of CANARD: a false or unfounded report or story

Car & Driver horrified lovers of unadulterated driving fun with the news that “just 6000 Subaru BRZ sports cars will be allocated to the U.S. for the 2013 model year.” The source of that report is somehow suspect: “A Subaru dealer.” Car and Driver’s telephone budget must have been cut. The magazine consulted Subaru’s website that says that the BRZ will be built in “extremely limited quantities.” Car and Driver also checked with an old C&D article that said that “Subaru thinks that 5000 ­ to 7000 per year would be enough.” Thus having performed its journalistic duty, Car and Driver ran with the story of a BRZ that will be available in homeopathic quantities only. Which, I assume, should trigger a run at dealerships.
(Read More…)

The repeated stoppages of the Volt production triggered rumors that GM might discontinue the Volt altogether.

Dan Akerson himself had to come to the rescue of the embattled plug-in. Saying that “we are not backing away from this product,” Akerson promised more advertising and less volume. So far, so good.

Then, Akerson did something really bad. Surprisingly, Akerson used Toyota as a benchmark and reportedly said that “Toyota sold about the same amount of Prius in its first year as the Volt in its first year.”

Utter nonsense. (Read More…)

China has become famous for its golden and pink cars. Now, there is some kind of a backlash. Or maybe word of Jack Baruth’s lime green Audi S5 has reached China? Can’t possibly drive an Audi S5 in gold, pink, or lime green in China after Jack’s frog-colored Audi was flogged on eBay. Even China has some standards. Instead of Audis in garish colors, there now are black and white Audis. “So what?” you say. I said black and white Audis. (Read More…)

A drunk man who was talking on his cell phone caused a three-car pile-up near Chicago, and he wasn’t even driving.

According to the Chicago Tribune, a 31-year-old intoxicated, and, to make matters worse, cell phone using man crossed Warrenville Road in Naperville, IL, after having visited a bar. Then, all hell broke loose. (Read More…)

When I started working for (not at) Volkswagen in the 70s, they talked about adding many brands, all the way “from MAN trucks to a motorcycle.” 40 years later, Volkswagen finally has MAN. And it might soon have that motorcycle wish fulfilled. (Read More…)

Some automakers have cars that get a stupendous mileage, but they are priced or built so that nobody wants them. We won’t name names, draw your own conclusions. A much better metric than the mileage of a car is the mileage of all cars you sell. The combined mileage of all cars sold by a manufacturer or brand used to be a top secret document. Manufacturers with stellar averages sometimes leaked theirs. But what good are these statistics if manufacturers with mediocre averages hide their data? Thankfully, last year TrueCar started tracking the MPG averages of cars sold in the U.S. And it is coming to surprising results. (Read More…)