The civilian version of the car shown in the video will soon be available for purchase, reports TheTycho from Beijing. It won’t come with the microphones and the stand-up podium behind the driver. Instead, it will have full reclining seats in  the back. (Read More…)

Emboldened Tata has announced new plans to export their Nano. To markets such as Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And Tata will do that carefully. “We will go after these markets one after another,” Tata CEO Carl-Peter Forster told Bloomberg at an industry event in Bochum, Germany. Gone are bravado and hype. No more mentions to export the $3,000 car to Europe or god forbid the U.S.A. (Read More…)

After Hyundai delivered a record profit of $4.7 billion yesterday, smaller sibling Kia announced its results today. The Kia’s 2010 net profits rose 55 percent to approximately $2 billion. Some analysts expected more, but the fourth quarter had only a rise of 4.6 percent.

Kia adds another 2,131,531 units to the combined Hyundai/Kia grand total, which now (according to our unofficial TTAC calculations) stands at 5,744,018 units. Where does that leave Ford? (Read More…)

Which are the safest cars you can buy in Europe? The results of Euro NCAP tests will rattle established Euro carmakers: Out of 5 categories, 2 were won by a Japanese car, one by a Korean car. In 2010, Euro NCAP crash tested twenty nine vehicles. 65 percent received  five stars.

Here are the best-of-class cars, according to Euro NCAP: (Read More…)

Troubled BYD has even more problems: Dealers defect the Chinese car maker, because the alleged master of the electric vehicle has perfected one ancient tradecraft: The art of channel stuffing. A Beijing BYD store switched to another brand because BYD required them to carry a whopping six times the monthly selling rate on the lot. The poor dealer that moved 70 BYDs in a good month was sitting on a steadily restocked inventory of 400 units.

Even that generous inventory strategy did not help: (Read More…)

“First smart ED Delivered in America.” (Read More…)

Hyundai Motor Co. today released impressive results. Net 2010 profit increased 77.8 percent to 5.3 trillion won  ($4.7 billion) on global sales of 3,612,487 units. That’s a 16.3 percent sales gain from a year earlier. Whoa, says the attentive observer of sales data, didn’t they make some 4.6 million last year? Where is the increase? The 4.6 million were Hyundai and Kia together.

Many journos will trip over that today. (Read More…)

Yesterday, I changed my base of operations to Tokyo for a month to escape the Chinese New Year festivities (i.e. one month of WW III worthy fireworks, combined with closed shops and restaurants.) If I would have stuck it out a few days longer, I could have enjoyed a ride in a fuel cell vehicle. (Read More…)

Volkswagen workers in Wolfsburg are looking forward to a long weekend. No work on Monday, come back Tuesday. Are people not buying enough cars? Im Gegenteil. They are buying too many. Volkswagen is seriously running out of parts. (Read More…)

When Ed Niedermeyer reported about Volkswagen’s new sub One Liter  (235 mpg) car, the XL1, currently on display in Qatar, he prognosticated that this “One Liter car represents a step closer to production.” A very close step, as it turns out. (Read More…)

It’s a nice idea: Each car is equipped with a wireless beacon, transmitting speed, direction and whatnot to other cars. For years, people have been dreaming about this. Now they could have found the killer app for the technology: By mashing up that information, collision courses could be plotted and lives could be saved. Exactly that was demonstrated yesterday to federal officials in Washington. (Read More…)

The recession must have come to a sudden end.  Volkswagen can’t make enough Phaetons to meet demand. Last year, Volkswagen sold 7,000 of the facelifted Über-VW. This year, all indicators say “mehr.” You probably suspect who’s buying most of those Phaetons: (Read More…)

The privileged life of the Chinese government employee is coming to an end. The southern metropolis of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) will be using GPS to track usage of the city’s government vehicles, with the aim of preventing their unauthorized personal use. It’s not that the city is trying to curb unnecessary spending. (Read More…)

10 days ago, we reported that Porsche’s Matthias Müller had told the German magazine Focus that Porsche will decide this year whether they will build the new Cajun in China. Or in the U.S. It didn’t take them long to make up their minds. (Read More…)

Mazda has so far been, well, reluctant when it came to newfangled powertrains. Now they can’t help it any longer and announce their intention to jump on the electric train. Mazda announced today that it is working on a plug-in. It is an electrified version of what Mazda sells as the Demio in Japan, or as the Mazda2 in most other markets. The pluggable Mazda will be available in spring of 2012. In a way. (Read More…)