Detroit carmakers continue telling their fairy tale of the closed Japanese market, and their UAW members eagerly hang on their lips. Both don’t want to admit that their products are largely unsalable in Japan, and they blame the mythical bad Nipponese wolf instead. At the same time, sales of imported cars are up for the third straight month in Japan. Sales of imports were 35,841 in September, the highest since September 1996, data released by the Japan Automobile Importers Association shows. (Read More…)

Japanese carmakers are worried about their sales in China after Japanese cars were smashed and dealerships torched during large scale anti-Japanese riots in China last month. As a first indicator that Japanese cars may be falling out of favor in China,  Mazda reports via Reuters that September sales in China dropped 35 percent. (Read More…)

When a Japanese chemical factory blew up over the weekend, it looked like baby bottoms would be most affected. Nippon Shokubai is one of the world’s largest producers of acrylic acid, which in turn is a key ingredient for the making of disposable diapers. Apart from causing a diaper dearth, the explosion also “may send shock waves through the auto industry,” as The Nikkei [sub] says. (Read More…)

“We do not need incentives for natural gas technology to drive adoption,” Bill Larkin, CFO of Westport Innovations, a Vancouver-based developer of technology that allows truck and bus engines to run on natural gas, told Reuters in an interview:

 “It actually hurts the investment in this technology because the U.S. government has been dangling this carrot … and so investments are delayed.” (Read More…)

A successful test of the “biggest rocket fired in the UK for over 20 years” cleared the way for an attack on the 1,000 mph mark in a car. According to Reuters, the rocket will be twinned with a fighter jet engine from a Eurofighter Typhoon. With that new “hybrid,” the team behind the Bloodhound supersonic car wants to smash the existing world land speed record of 763 mph and go all the way to 1,000 mph. (Read More…)

Mitsubishi, pretty much given up for dead in the U.S. and Europe, thrives in an easily overlooked part of the world: South-East Asia. Mitsubishi has three assembly plants in Thailand, and will spend around $150 million to increase output. (Read More…)

They called it the “Ferrari of the East”: The Melkus RS 1000 was East Germany’s only sports car, “powered” by a mid-mounted Wartburg 3-cylinder 2-stroke engine. Most cars had 1 liter engine, a few were 1.2 liter mills. Fitted with gullwing doors, it looked fast. 101 cars were made between 1969 and 1979 in the Dresden factory, to buy one, you had to race it.  In 2009, Sepp Melkus, grand child of founder Heinz Melkus, resurrected the company and started building the Melkus RS 2000.  No more, the company is bankrupt. (Read More…)

The seventh generation of Volkswagen’s venerable and best-selling hatch, the Golf, has barely been launched in Europe, and Volkswagen is already looking into producing it abroad. Volkswagen aims at two regions that usually prefer cars with trunks: China and America. (Read More…)

16,290 people were killed in road accidents from January through June, says the NHTSA. For the first time since 2006, deaths are up. The NHTSA does not know why fatalities are up, but the usual suspects have already been rounded up. (Read More…)

The fortunes of small cars used to be tied to gas prices. Sales of compacts rose when gas prices shot up, when gas came down, big was beautiful again.  Sales of small cars are up strongly in America, but this time, it’s different, think two of the US motor industry’s most senior executives. They believe that the trend won’t reverse, and that sales of small cars will go further up. (Read More…)

The public may have been surprised by the very strong showing of the market and the not so strong showing of GM and Ford when the September sales came in yesterday. Jessica Caldwell of Edmunds and Jesse Toprak of TrueCar weren’t surprised at all. They called the market with high precision. Separated by only 0.2 points, Caldwell made first, Toprak second, followed far behind by Peter Nesvold of Jefferies. (Read More…)

First September sales reports are coming in, and they are a mixed bag. Chrysler says it had the best September since 2007 with sales up 12 percent. GM’s sales are up only 1.5 percent , while Ford reports zero percent growth.
Volkswagen sold 36,339 vehicles in September, up 34.4 percent. Toyota’s sales are up a whopping 41.5 percent to 171,910 units in September 2012.

Watch this space for more sales coverage throughout the day.

Are you a short seller who is on the hunt for companies that are worse off than European carmakers?  Look for parts makers that are also in the contract manufacturing business. OEMs may lose sales, but contract manufacturers lose whole contracts when manufacture is brought in-house by OEMs. Magna is likely to lose the contract with BMW to build the next generation of Mini cars, says Reuters. (Read More…)

Sales won’t be the only thing up when September new car sales are reported today. (Keep an eye on TTAC.) “”Transaction prices in September are the highest in years,” said Jesse Toprak, research chief of TrueCar.com.   (Read More…)

For most of the year, the German new car market could defy Europe’s eye-popping g-forces. No more. Germany is now officially going down with the rest of them. With 250,082 units sold in September, German new car sales dropped 10.9 percent as compared to September last year. (Read More…)