Not content with being the best selling compact car and third best selling passenger car in the United States, the Honda Civic is not only Canada’s best selling car for 2012, but it absolutely crushed the competition – outselling the #2 Hyundai Elantra and #3 Toyota Corolla combined.

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Fans of the station wagon rejoice – Chevrolet has a new product for those of you seeking an alternative to the Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen, in the form of the Chevrolet Cruze station wagon.

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Subtract two doors and a back seat from the Kia Soul and add a 250 horsepower and all-wheel drive and you have the Kia Track’ster concept. The initial sketches of the Track’ster were pretty underwhelming, but this car looks much better in photographs. A one inch longer wheelbase and a Brembo brake system with 14 inch rotors up front, 13.6 inches in the back and a combination of 6 and 4 piston brake calipers (front and rear) add to the Track’ster’s spec sheet. Instead of the rear seats, there’s a compartment for spare tires and safety gear like helmets.

Hang on to your hairplugs. The 2013 Ford Shelby GT500 has the same 650 horsepower supercharged 5.8L V8 making 600 lb-ft of torque. But unlike the 200 mph coupe, the ‘vert will only top out at 155 mph. The vert does get 6-piston Brembo brakes, a carbon fiber driveshaft, an upgraded clutch, electronically adjustable Bilstein shocks and a Motley Crue Greatest Hits CD in the Shaker audio system.

The 2013 GMC Acadia gets a pretty mild update, with cosmetic changes playing the biggest role here. A new “center airbag”, which inflates via the right side of the driver’s seat (to protect passengers from an opposite-side impact) is also featured. The two changes are not quite the major redesign that was expected. We’ll have live shots later in the day.

New car sales in China imploded in January. This will be the message when the official data by the CAAM are announced. Which should happen any minute.

The signs are ominous: Yesterday, GM China, TTAC’s in-house leading indicator, announced (in a way) that sales in January had been down by 8 percent. Then, China’s largest carmaker SAIC said that its January was down 8.5 percent. Today, the China Passenger Car Association told China Daily that the car market in China had nosedived16.5 percent from a year earlier to 1.17 million units in January. Late in the afternoon in Yokohama at Nissan’s quarterly earnings conference, Nissan’s Corporate Vice President, Joji Tagawa proudly pronounced that Nissan sales “declined only 16 percent” in China, while the Chinese car market as a whole registered “a negative 28 percent,” and isn’t that wonderful?

Whoa!!!! What’s going on?

Is the sky over China finally falling? It sure looks like it. (Read More…)

Fisker Automotive has laid off a total of 66 people, including 20 at a former GM plant in Delaware, and another 40 contractors in California. The layoffs come as Fisker attempts to re-negotiate loans from the Department of Energy that were contingent on Fisker meeting sales targets for its Karma sedan, which Fisker failed to do.

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The Volkswagen Phaeton is supposed to be the definition of understated refinement, a Patek Calatrava in a world gone mad for Hublot Big Bangs. Someone in Toronto, Canada didn’t get the memo.

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The small crossover segment is heating up, with the Honda CR-V, Ford Escape and Mazda CX-5 squaring off as this year’s new entrants in an already crowded field. Starting at $20,695, the CX-5 will get class leading fuel economy numbers of 26/35 mpg thanks to the SKYACTIV 2.0L 4-cylinder engine – and a 6-speed manual gearbox.

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The Honda Civic is moving up its planned refresh of the 2013 Civic to fall of 2012, after just over a year on the market. The confirmation came at a Honda dealer meeting, and the refresh will apparently go beyond just cosmetic changes inside and out.

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