Think of it as a merger of the equally sick: PSA’s automotive division (Peugeot Citroen) and Opel could be put into one company, a joint venture between GM and PSA, La Tribune reports with Reuters providing the translation.

Volkswagen wants to go back to its “People’s Car” roots, and plans to launch a new low-cost brand by about 2015, Reuters says. With a a price range of between 5,000 and 10,000 euros ($6,500-$12,900), Volkswagen wants to emulate the success of Renault’s Dacia. Nissan resurrected Datsun as a low-cost brand to help gain market share in lucrative emerging markets.

German unions know that “end of October” means more for GM than October 31. German unions now demand a final deal with Opel by October 26. If there is no deal, it will cost Opel: Opel can defer paying a 4.3 percent industry-wide wage rise until October 31, if there is no deal, Opel has to pay. Also on October 31, GM will publish its third-quarter earnings.

Volkswagen published group totals for September. They are not quite the 6.8 million rumored a few days ago, but close enough. According to Volkswagen data, groupwide sales reached 6.71 million for the first three quarters of 2012, up 9.7 percent. In September, sales were up 6.5 percent to 801,000. In China, Volkswagen pierced the 2 million barrier.

There is a GOD: With Europe paying a lot of penance for its sins, we might be spared hell in form of a Lamborghini and Bentley SUV. In order to save cash for Volkswagen, the company may put the Lamborghini Urus and the Bentley SUV, codenamed EXP9F, on ice, Reuters says.

Volkswagen hasn’t published its group sales for September yet (it is expected to do so later in the week), but Reuters already saw a PowerPoint slide with 6.802 million vehicles on it, sold between January and September. This would mean an increase of 10.6 percent in the first nine months. Volkswagen published Audi sales yesterday, and Volkswagen Passenger Vehicle sales (see below) today. Looking at these numbers, the 6.8 million are quite possible.

Smiles in Ingolstadt and Wolfsburg, where Audi contributes 40 percent of Volkswagen Group’s profits: Audi’s global sales climbed 13.6 percent in September to 136,600 units delivered worldwide. 1,097,500 cars were sold in the first nine months, 12.8 percent more than in the prior-year period.

We’ve been told again and again that pooled parts purchasing produces profits. Baloney, Opel interim-chief Thomas Sedran will say in an interview that Germany’s Tagesspiegel will publish tomorrow. He says something GM customers have known for a while: Parts from GM’s bin often are too expensive, and by sourcing them elsewhere, one can save a lot of money. “We are talking a significant order of magnitude,” Sedran will say tomorrow.

Volkswagen workers who make the Passat at the Emden factory in Germany are enjoying a mini-vacation. After the national holiday last Wednesday, which celebrated the fall of the wall and the re-unification, Volkswagen workers can celebrate falling sales of the Passat, and stay at home, says Germany’s Handelsblatt. Meanwhile, managers at Volkswagen are busy down–revising their production plans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the thought of a four-cylinder BMW gives you the creeps, then this will cause chronic dermatitis: BMW is thinking of putting three-cylinder engines into vehicles sold in the United States.

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.

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.

So far, German car companies Volkswagen and Daimler had been unaffected by the severe downdraft in Europe and brought in record profits. Now, the Teflon seems to be flaking off.

Nordschleife-enthusiasts, head for your lists. Still a year away from its official launch, the Porsche 918 Spyder rounded the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 07:14 minutes. Not bad for a plug-in hybrid. The timing however, could have been a bit more high-tech.

From now on, Porsche should have even more good PR than PReviously. Today, TTAC was reached by two press releases, celebrating the momentous occasion of the partial production of the Boxster model at Volkswagen Osnabrück. One release came from Porsche. The other, you guessed it, came from Volkswagen.

A court in Braunschweig, Germany, dismissed two investor lawsuits against Porsche SE, “sending a discouraging signal to claimants still seeking just over 4 billion euros ($5.2 billion) in damages in Germany,” as Reuters says.

Volkswagen announced global Group sales for August, and they are a whopping 18.9 percent over August 2011. For the first eight months of the year, Volkswagen Group deliveries are 10.2 percent ahead of what VW delivered in the same period last year. With all the bad news from Europe, how can a European car company deliver such good numbers, you ask?

GM is not the only U.S. automaker that wants to close a plant in Europe, and Ford is thinking about more than the end of the road for Alan Mulally. German press, from the industry magazine Automobil Produktion to the German edition of the Wall Street Journal are talking about Ford shuttering its plant in Genk, Belgium.

With their Washington overlords breathing down their necks, GM executives are pushing Opel for a definitive agreement to close Opel’s Bochum plant. According to the Wall Street Journal, GM “would like to be able to announce the plan before or along with its third-quarter earnings, which are expected to be disclosed Oct. 31.”

Keep smoking.

Wolfsburg is working hard on making the (new) Beetle’s image a bit manlier. It hopes to get support for this endeavor from two R-Line packages that are based on the top “Sport” version: an exterior package and an interior package.

The New Mercedes A-Class should be at dealers in Europe any day now. In the U.S., it is expected to go on sale in the United States in 2014. Not that many people are dying to see an overpriced hatchback. A sedan probably would sell better. One was spotted halfway between Germany and America, in Iceland.

Volkswagen’s plans of sending GM to place three on the podium of the world’s largest automakers are most likely postponed. Volkswagen down-revised its 2012 sales plan by 300,000 units, heard Germany’s Handelsblatt.

Opel must feel like someone who’s on his deathbed, surrounded by relatives who muse how much the organs will fetch. After we ran our piece on Detroit rumors about Opel and PSA, everybody started to weigh in on the issue. The recommendation by a Wall Street analyst that GM should “dump Opel” made headlines around the world. The Economist mused aloud what an “Opel-less future” would be like.

Even here in Chengdu, China, Opel was given up for dead.

Germany hasn’t seen the double digit sales losses of other EU countries, but it isn’t walking on water either. August sales in Germany were down 4.7 percent on 226,455 units, says the KBA. For the first eight months of the year, sales in Germany now are 0.6 percent below the same period of the prior year.

Rubbing shoulders with industry types displaced to a Chinese city called Chengdu has its good parts. You hear stories you normally don’t see in a press release. An executive who works for the western partner of a large Chinese joint venture told me today that my story about Chinese interests killing the Opel deal between GM and PSA wasn’t true. At least not completely. As so often, in the denial was a much more interesting story. After another drink for encouragement, said executive told me very much off the record that GM is tired of the PSA deal and wants out. If that means leaving Opel for dead, so be it.

Volkswagen launched its seventh generation Golf to high acclaim yesterday, but there are people who think it is not good enough. Greenpeace picketed its premiere in Berlin last night, “accusing the German carmaker of doing too little to reduce fuel consumption and tarnishing the most important model launch in the group’s calendar,” as Reuters writes .

Today, the seventh generation of the Volkswagen Golf was presented in Berlin. 38 years after the launch of the first Golf in 1974, and 29.13 million cars later, Volkswagen shows a new Golf that is 100 kg lighter and up to 23 per cent more fuel efficient that the predecessor. If a new Golf ever was “all new” then this one: Built with the new MQB architecture, everything in the new Golf had to be redesigned. And here is a picture count-up, from first to newest.

GM is backing out of plans to share the Opel Insignia platform with its partner PSA, says Der Spiegel. It was planned that PSA will build a mid-sized Peugeot and Citroen with next gen Insignia underpinnings. The cars would have been made at Opel’s Rüsselsheim factory. Together with the Opel model, the cars would have filled the available capacity. Scratch that plan. It wasn’t killed because it was a bad idea. It was killed because Buick and especially GM China complained, says the magazine.

“Volkswagen is on course to bump General Motors into the world no.3 ranking this year,” writes Reuters. That’s not all. Volkswagen “aims to sell a world-leading 10 million vehicles by 2018, up from the 8.36 million recorded last year, and push past Toyota.”

The car that is supposed to lead Volkswagen to world domination is an also-ran in the U.S., but it is one of the world’s most sold cars. It is the Golf, and its seventh generation will be revealed tonight in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Mies van der Rohe designed temple of modern art.

Volkswagen chief Martin Winterkorn heaped salt into the open wounds of Europe’s embattled automakers. In light of the drooping demand, Europe could perfectly manage with 10 fewer plants, Winterkorn said in an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt. However, don’t you’re your breath on Volkswagen shutting down any of its EU assembly lines. Volkswagen stand behind its European sites “without ifs and buts.” What about Sergio Marchionne’s accusations that Volkswagen is waging a brutal price war in Europe? Winterkorn: “Nonsense.”

The united Europe is more and more turning into a divided Europe, at least when it comes to making cars. On one side are the hugely profitable German carmakers Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler and Porsche. On the other side are its loss-making or barely-profitable rivals including Fiat, Peugeot-Citroen, Renault and GM’s Opel. Now, the split drives the two countries apart that started Europe’s unification, France and Germany.

France’s new socialist government wants to punish buyers of bigger cars with huge taxes while lifting the tax burden on smaller cars. The bigger cars are mostly German.

Wolfsburg’s Über-VW, the Phaeton, will be produced in China. At least if the Chinese car site Auto.163 is correct. The news is coming to you via Chinacartimes, which doubts the article’s veracity, not only because the logic behind Auto.163’s reasoning is a bit backwards. Is it really?

There had been consistent rumors of an entry-level Porsche, below the Boxster. Porsche CEO Matthias Müller discounted the rumors, again and again. Just to be sure, Müller denied rumors of a discount Porsche again today, but he also admitted that plans for a low price Porsche were not mere rumors. The plans exist. Somewhere on a shelf at Porsche.

Porsche saw the Paris Motor Show coming, and asked: “Und was zeigen wir denn da?” A Porsche FNG had an idea: “How about a 4WD Porsche 911 Carrera?” The others rolled their eyes: “Been done before.” The FNG did not give up: “How about a new 4WD Porsche 911 Carrera then?” And so it happened.

New panic at GM’s European Opel dependence: Opel needs to shed 30 percent of its workers. This is the supposed target of a “secret strategy” that has been agreed between Opel and GM, says BILD, Europe’s largest circulation newspaper under the headline “One out of three jobs imperiled!”

Based on an anonymous inside source, BILD writes about a three-step phased plan:

The German edition of the Financial Times has a story about “broken taboos.” It says that “smaller Mercedes models and cars of Nissan’s premium division Infiniti could together roll off the assembly lines in 2016.” The FTD heard that the joint car could be “a small SUV, possibly based on the Mercedes A or B class.” Reuters has a good English abstract of the German story. Apparently, the FTD was asleep when a major busting of taboos was perpetrated in the beginning of the year.

GM’s troubled German daughter will close its main factory in Rüsselsheim and its component plant in Kaiserslautern for a total of four weeks in response to a drop in demand for cars in Europe.

It’s a little less than 40 years ago that a newly minted copywriter called Bertel Schmitt wrote his first ads for a newly minted car called Volkswagen Golf. As chronicled in the Autobiography of BS, the car became an involuntary star. At its launch, everybody at Volkswagen was convinced it would be a dud.

29 million cars later, the Golf is one of the world’s most sold cars, and by large Volkswagen’s most important. In a few weeks, Volkswagen will launch its all—new seventh generation of the Golf, the emm-kay seven in blogger parlance. This is a make-or-break launch. If something would go wrong with this launch, it would be doubly bad for Volkswagen. The new Golf also is the first Volkswagen that is based on VW’s new modular MQB architecture.

This will be a wee complicated and very British: The Schneider Trophy, a prize competition for seaplanes was won several times by a Supermarine S6B, which in turn was powered by a Rolls-Royce R Type engine. Follow so far? What does this have to do with cars? Honestly, not the foggiest. But Rolls-Royce Motor Cars proudly presents the Phantom Coupé Aviator Collection, which is said to be inspired by said seaplanes. Still with me? Alright.

GM’s Opel unit is faced with dwindling demand and wants to shorten workers’ hours at its Rüsselsheim plant, media from Reuters to Germany’s Manager Magazin report. Rüsselsheim makes the Opel Insignia, and for that, the rapidly deteriorating southern European markets are especially important, an Opel spokesman said. A shortened work week at Opel’s engine plant in Kaiserslautern is also being negotiated, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says. However, this is Germany, and it is not as easy as is sounds.

Europeans: Use instead of Euros. Americans: Use it as a screensaver

Shame, yes, shame on you, Americans, you horrible people. You are the weakest of the globe – when it comes to Porsche’s July numbers. Porsche sales in the U.S. climbed only a miserable one percent. At the same time, people in Europe withdrew their last sinking Euros from faltering banks and moved them to the safety of a new 911 or Cayman.

While in Detroit the leaking remains limited to gossip and innuendo, Opel in Germany sprung a Deepwater Horizon–sized leak that could pollute the political landscape for years. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says it is in possession of something that is regarded as part of the crown jewels of a car company: The long-term production plan through the next decade. It’s bad enough that a paper publishes closely guarded secrets – their publication could blow-up the plan.

The excitement about battery electric vehicles seems to die down amidst disappointing uptake. Range, weight and cost are in the way. At the same time, dormant interest in fuel cell vehicles is being rekindled . A month ago, we had a new look at the technology from the perspective of the Toyota/BMW linkup. Today, The Nikkei [sub] takes a broader view and says that carmakers are in the final lap of the fuel cell race. Let’s have a look at the contestants and where they stand.

After three years of work, police in Germany concluded its probe into the affair surrounding the failed takeover of Volkswagen by Porsche. Former Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking and his then CFO Holger Haerter have been investigated for market manipulation. According to Der Spiegel, the public prosecutor in Stuttgart, Germany, will charge the duo. Reuters heard meanwhile that the trigger is not yet being pulled, and that the two have three suspense-filled months ahead of them.

I have done a lot of motorbike magazine work over the years. Every so often, someone dusts off a very old idea: “What is faster, car or motorbike?” This is a boring question, because even since Newton, the answer always was: The motorbike has a better power-to-weight ratio, so it will out-accelerate the car on the straights. The car will gain in the corners through higher speeds and it can brake later, because the limiting factor in braking a sports bike is geometry: Your maximum deceleration happens with the back wheel barely touching the ground. After that, you lose braking power because you are flipping over. The same is true for acceleration btw (you flip over in the other direction), but since nearly all cars are fat and slow compared to a sports bike, this limit doesn’t matter much. So the outcomes of these tests depended solely on the track. Sometimes, the track favors the bike, sometimes it likes the car. Motorcyclists who know their physics like to infuriate other sports bike riders by passing them in the bends with a Civic when they have to use it for their shopping. And car guys hate it when they have to slow down on the Nordschleife in a twisty bit for a bike which then shoots ahead on the straight just to block the next corner by seeming to park there. Such was the accepted truth. Until a few months ago.

German new car sales are no longer Teflon-coated. New car sales in Deutschland were down 5 percent in July, Germany’s Kraftfahrtbundesamt reports.

When a common law couple finally stops living in sin and ties the knot, it usually is (in more ways than one) an anticlimactic event. And so it is today. Today, August 1, Porsche finally came home to Volkswagen.

It’s not all blood and tears in Europe. Actually, the bloodier Europe looks, and the more Marchionne & Co do cry, the bigger the smiles at European carmakers with heavy exposure to foreign markets. The Euro is way down, and a low Euro means heavy profits from abroad – if you have business abroad. BMW sure does, and it posted its second best quarterly earnings in company history. Profit before financial result (EBIT) amounted to € 2.27 billion in the April-June 2012 quarter.

Germany’s Auto-BILD thinks it knows how it will look when Daimler shrinks the G-Wagen. In 2015, Daimler will bring out a GLG based on the new A-Class, says the magazine. Auto-BILD hasn’t seen more than the own renderings, but that doesn’t keep the rag from bitching:

Well into the first decade of the new millennium, Changchun, China, was Volkswagen’s Siberia. When someone was transferred to the frigid city in Northern China, the others inevitably asked: “What did you do?”

It looks like Opel is quickly becoming GM’s Siberia, and people rather desert than going.

A few months ago, Volkswagen extended its joint venture contract with Chinese partner FAW for another 25 years, with appropriate pomp and circumstance: Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and German Chancellor Angela Merkel witnessed the signature. Now, Volkswagen takes the unusual step of going semi-public with the theft of intellectual property. According to reports in German media, FAW has “systematically and repeatedly” stolen designs of important components such as engines and transmissions. Volkswagen’s hands are tied.

Fiat & Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne’s pointed remarks have attracted the ire of Europe’s 500 pound gorilla Volkswagen. VW demanded that Marchionne steps down as president of the European auto manufacturers association ACEA. If he won’t resign, Volkswagen could resign its ACEA membership – which would send the club into instant irrelevancy, not to mention insolvency.

As you read this, an old friend of mine is probably packing. Who knows, he could already be in the air. He was Volkswagen’s boots on the ground in Malaysia, the many times VW wanted to get its boots on the ground in Malaysia. Last time they tried in 2007, they disrupted Dirk’s retirement and sent him to Kuala Lumpur, where dealers of fake watches greeted him as the old friend he was by that time. German media says, Volkswagen did not give up and they are trying again.

It looks more and more like a divided Europe. While carmakers Opel, Ford, PSA, Fiat etc. are wailing with pain, German carmakers report expectation-beating profits.

“Should Opel, Chevy coexist in Europe?” This is what Automotive News [sub] asks today without offering a real answer. Let’s have a look. Then, cast your vote.