Nissan bought back two Leafs from Arizona customers who complained about deteriorating batteries. Automotive News [sub] thinks “this could mollify a small group of Leaf owners and green-car enthusiasts.” However, it does not look like it. (Read More…)

Reporters of Reuters, roaming the floors of the doom-dominated Paris Auto Show, finally found a feel-good trend: Green supercars, or make that guilt-free kickass swank, targeted at cash-positive crisis-sated, climate-conscious consumers . (Read More…)

McLaren shows the P1 concept at the Paris Motor Show. Due to budgetary constraints, we had to outsource the video to India, and leave the reporting to Ireland’s Student News, which reports: (Read More…)

Renault chief Carlos Ghosn said in a radio interview with RTL that his company could leave France if it is unable to compete at home. Asked if Renault could disappear, Ghosn said: “In its current form, yes.” (Read More…)

• “Perhaps no story will get more play than the third-quarter earnings report General Motors has now scheduled for October 31, less than a week before the election. Could this prove to be the sort of October Surprise that has sank or resurrected so many presidential bids in the past?” (Read More…)

TTAC readers who followed our past reporting on the developing relationship between Daimler and the Renault/Nissan Alliance will not be surprised in hearing what Carlos Ghosn and Dieter Zetsche told the press today. If you think you’ve heard it all before, you are right. You did here. (Read More…)

GM’s Susan Docherty, who is in charge of Chevrolet Europe, is shocked by  GM alliance partner PSA Peugeot Citroen. PSA, along with Fiat, are producing “very scary numbers” with discounts of as much as 30 percent off gross sale prices, Docherty told Bloomberg. Opel’s numbers can be even scarier. (Read More…)

A day after TrueCar and Kelley handed in their sales forecasts for September, Edmunds followed. Edmunds is more on the cautious side and projects that 1,145,344 new cars and trucks will be sold in the U.S. this month for an estimated Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) of 14.4 million light vehicles, and up 8.8 percent from a year before. (Read More…)

European auto sales likely will fall 8 percent this year, Renault/Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn told Reuters today in Paris. Should some industry leaders be hoping for government help, then Ghosn has bad news for them. There is “zero chance” for a government-led restructuring of Europe’s auto industry. ” Every company is going to have to deal with its own problems,” Ghosn said. (Read More…)

Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho was sitting in his company jet, ready to go to Beijing for talks with the Chinese leadership, but the jet never got off the ground. After Chinese aviation authorities refused landing permission in Beijing, Cho left his plane and went home, NHK reports. (Read More…)

In Part 1 of our talk with Infiniti CEO Johan de Nysschen at his new office at the Infiniti world headquarters in Hong Kong, we talked about his new job, about new directions for Infiniti, and for the brand. In the second part, we talk about the new cars Infiniti will bring, where they will be made, what engines will be in them, and what deNysschen thinks about the plan to sell half a million by 2016.

In April at the Beijing auto show, Nissan’s Andy Palmer said he wants to see 500,000 Infiniti sold by 2016, while conceding that this is “an aggressive target.” In the last fiscal year, Infiniti sold 141,000 units worldwide, 105,000 of those in the Americas. In carefully crafted words, de Nysschen explains what he thinks of the 500,000 unit target: (Read More…)

TTAC  has written many times about the growing dependency on China, and now there is a voice that says that GM is more enslaved to China than it is to Washington. (Read More…)

Researchers at MIT’s AgeLab finally have proven what designers have long suspected: Some typefaces are easier to read than others. Because this would be a boring message,  and because the New England University Transportation Center and typeface vendor Monotype were also involved in the study, the researchers put it in context with in-dash menus.  And came to the conclusion that the choice of typeface is a matter of life and death. (Read More…)

The month is coming to an end. A sure indicator: The forecasters are submitting their guesses. Again, September seems to be up solidly. More. Or less. (Read More…)

CAREFUL, NOISY! Lower volume before playing.

The Paris auto show opens its doors tomorrow to the press (sans TTAC, our suggestion to make a pilgrimage in a Dacia all the way from Rumania to Paris was inexplicably met with an “um, maybe another time,”) but the thoughts of makers of luxury cars are in China, where their party could be over. (Read More…)