The Chevrolet Volt is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle, followed by Toyota’s plug-in Prius and Nissan’s Leaf, Bloomberg says. (Read More…)

As a Chinese New Year expert, you most likely know where February auto sales in China headed: Down. Knowing how our patent-pending Chinese sales oracle, GM, did, you could also predict that there is a silver lining. And so it happened. (Read More…)

The Geneva Auto Salon is a small show in a small city of a small country. The show is big because it is an annual confab of automakers where shoulders are rubbed, mergers are planned, policies are set. The cars are mostly decoration. A top topic in Geneva was how to meet rigid EU emission limits. “There is a growing awareness that conventional hybrids and slow-selling battery cars simply won’t be enough,” Reuters reports from Geneva. (Read More…)

You won’t be able to send to or receive from *.Cadillac, *.Chevrolet, or *.GMC, while friends of other brands, from Dodge through Toyota,  will have that pleasure. General Motors withdrew three applications for what is called a “generic top level domain” or gTLD. Oddly, the applications for Buick and the supposedly illegal Chevy are still on the books. (Read More…)

Hyundai and Buick are feeling the heat in China, and the industry might rethink past practices of freewheeling Twitter snark. Hyundai and a Buick dealer made remarks about the quality of their products after a 2-month-old baby was abducted along with the RAV4 it was in. Chinese commenters did not like it at all. (Read More…)

The family of Soho China real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi and his wife Zhang Xin is about to buy a 40 percent stake in the 1.8 million square foot General Motors building in Manhattan, Reuters says. (Read More…)

Despite Audi CEO Rupert Stadler’s warnings that the effect of the Chinese New Year affects the usually glorious Audi numbers, Audi’s February sales still are something to be proud of. (Read More…)

While other carmakers, including electric pioneer Nissan,  are downgrading their EV euphoria, GM’s CEO Dan Akerson suddenly sounds uncharacteristically gung-ho on the issue. At an industry conference, he says GM is working on developing an electric car that has a range of as much as 200 miles. (Read More…)

All of you who talked smack about the New Jeep Cherokee, take note: Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne believes in this car, so much that he predicts Chrysler selling more than 800,000 Jeeps worldwide in 2013.

At the Geneva Motor Show, Marchionne told Reuters: (Read More…)

When Toyota gets on the horn by lunchtime to tell Tokyo’s media to show up at 4:30 the same day, everybody knows it will be a big surprise and an even bigger deal. Today, Japan’s Fourth Estate already knew what’s coming when the phone rang. It still was a big deal: Toyota completely reshuffled its top executives. It even brought a non-Japanese on board, a former GM man to boot. (Read More…)

In the good old days, when things were how they were supposed to, the first world got new cars first, and the third world got them three generations later. This time-tested principle is being set on its head. It started as an ugly trend in Japan, where Japanese received their new Latio ages after people in China or Thailand had already wrecked it. Subaru did a similar stunt with the XV. Now this disease is spreading to Europe, and the carrier is the Ford EcoSport. (Read More…)

Today, GM did something highly unusual: It abandoned all spin and said that sales in China were down pretty much across the board in February: “General Motors and its joint ventures sold 215,070 vehicles in China during February. Sales were down 10.6 percent from the same month last year due to the week-long Lunar New Year holiday falling in February this year.” We at TTAC understand. (Read More…)

A U.K. court dismissed a libel lawsuit from Tesla against the BBC show “Top Gear,” Bloomberg reports.

The case had been thrown out  before. Tesla appealed. (Read More…)

Not to be outdone by the bull from Wolfsburg, BMW’s adopted super-luxury brand, Rolls Royce, offers its “most powerful and dynamic Rolls-Royce in history.” The Wraith, a car “with just a hint of the noir,” as Rolls says in an email. (Read More…)

The volks who worry about Volkswagen being incapable of directing its big band of brands should make a trip to Geneva. Today, the boys from Wolfsburg launch a barrage at all target groups.

Aimed at the “blogger who drives mother’s old Celica and googles for super car pics” segment, Lamborghini delivers more bull: (Read More…)