Domestic sales of regular new cars, trucks and buses increased 40.9 percent in June, while sales of mini vehicles  rose 48.4 percent on the year. Overall, Japan’s new motorvehicle market rose 43.6 percent on 505,342 units sold. The data compare with a post-tsunami June 2011. (Read More…)

Analysts polled by Bloomberg predicted June light vehicle sales to come in much lower. All analysts except one: John Sousanis of Ward’s predicted that this will be a good month. He nearly nailed the SAAR, and came closest to reality in his OEM forecasts. (Read More…)

Mazda’s Skyactiv engines are hitting on all cylinders. The company will double production capacity at its engine plant in Hiroshima from 400,000 units to 800,000 units per year in October 2012. The capacity increase is “in response to increasing demand” for Skyactiv-equipped cars, the company  said in an emailed statement. (Read More…)

Chrysler Group up 20 percent, GM up 16 percent, Toyota up 60 percent. Across the board sales up 22 percent (see table.)

June sales of new cars and trucks come in stronger than the cautious estimates of analysts. Why?  America’s most successful sales predictor thinks everybody needed to “make that quarter.” (Read More…)

Sergio Pininfarina died overnight in his Turin home at the age of 85. The company that bears its name designed almost every Ferrari since the 1950s and delivered the shapes of cars from the 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Rondine to the 1996 Peugeot 406 Coupe. Sajeev will have a tribute to the man later on.

GM has blamed Western Europe location for Opel’s woes, unions, the economy. Opel has a brand crisis, and the crisis is “a self inflicted-wound,” says Christiaan Hetzner, Reuters’ man in Frankfurt, Germany, in an article on why Opel is in so much trouble. “Reputation is seen as the problem, not cars.” The recent attempts to move the Opel brand up-market ripped those old wounds open and could kill the patient. (Read More…)

About one third of all cars sold in Japan are an oddity: Cars for midgets. Kei cars. Limited in size (11.2 by 4.9 ft), displacement (40 cid), and power (63hp). “Americans won’t buy them,” says our contact at Honda who meets us in the basement garage of Honda’s headquarters in Tokyo. “Americans want big.” We are here to test whether a Kei car can be pressed into duty as the epitome of big, as a chauffeured limousine.

“We,” that is Martin Koelling, East Asia correspondent of  Germany’s Handelsblatt, and I. Martin already excelled as a very capable driver at our from-the-backseat test of the Lexus GS 350 F Sport. That was in the serene setting of Kagoshima. Today, we are in the 13 million metropolis of Tokyo.

I have been around many cars in my life. My favorite part is the backseat, and my favorite drive is to be driven. I quickly learned that “driver, why don’t you raise the partition” signals the most fun one can have in a car.  But how much fun can you have in a Kei, a car that is normally not associated with party space, except among anchovies? (Read More…)

The sprawling city Guangzhou in southern China sprung a nasty surprise on its (pop. 12.7 million citizens: it drastically slashed the number of new cars being registered. Observers predict that this move could have far-reaching consequences on the Chinese car market. (Read More…)

What car does Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi  a.k.a. His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco drive? He drives a Prius.

Today, he switched it for a plug-in hybrid Prius. The minute the first plug-ion hybrid was available in Europe, Toyota shipped it to Monaco as a two month loaner. (Read More…)

The intensified alliance between Toyota and BMW shines a new light on a technology that has been discussed for decades, but that never quite made it: Hydrogen fuel cells. BMW will get access to Toyota’s fuel cell technologies. This most likely spells the end of the fuel cell cooperation between BMW and GM. Let’s take another look. (Read More…)

“At the Nürburgring, there is always a car that passes me. It is a BMW.“ So said Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda today as he announced a deepening of the relationships between Toyota, and the company that makes those cars that pass Toyoda on the Ring. The surprising part: BMW and Toyota will jointly “develop architecture and components for a future sports vehicle.” (Read More…)

For two years, the world was worried about a possible rare earth shock, triggered by the crafty Chinese. As they are withholding the dirt that is essential for magnets, motors, and generators, an electrified world will go on its knees – or so the theory went.

The opposite happened. Right when everybody was ready to blame the high prices of EVs and hybrids on the Chinese,  prices of rare earths crashed. Small miners went belly-up. And now, shockers of shockers, The Nikkei [sub] says that Japan found 200 years’ worth of rare earth near an island. Even bigger shocker: The island is not on the China side of Japan, it’s in the Pacific. (Read More…)

A mysterious Lexus LFA that went from Motomachi to (the green) hell is fueling the fantasy of bloggers. Some say the Tiffany-blue bolide belongs to the Sheikh of Qatar, who just happens to like his cars in Tiffany blue. Others say it is the LFA going out with a bang, attacking the elusive Nordschleife ring record one last time “with an engine over 600 bhp.” They all made it up.

This is not a story about the LFA. This is a story about bloggers sucking stories out of their thumbs. (Read More…)

With only a few days until the end of the month, Edmunds issued its June sales forecast. Edmunds expects that 1,270,901 new cars will be sold in June, translating into a 20.7 percent increase compared to June 2011, and a 4.7 percent decrease from May 2012. The Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) is projected to come in at 13.9 million light vehicles. (Read More…)

The new CX-5 SUV is selling so well that Mazda has to expand capacity by 50 percent. (Read More…)