Remember when Volkswagen’s goal of 800,000 units in America seemed utterly implausible? TTAC does. But Volkswagen, which was in the dumps not too long ago, is now more than half-way to their goal, selling 438,000 units in the United States, a 35 percent jump over last year. But that kind of growth isn’t likely to carry over for 2013.

With stiff competition coming from both Holden’s HSV sedans and the Ford Falcon FPV, Chrysler is looking to make the 300C SRT8 more competitive by offering a decontented version, that’s actually a bit quicker than the standard-spec car.

Swedish clothing store H&M offers a generous 30-day return policy that urges customers to Buy It Now, Return It Later. Looks like Vauxhall will be following suit.

Infiniti has decided to abandon its current alphanumeric strategy for…an all-new alphanumeric strategy whereby passenger cars are given the “Q” designation, and crossovers and SUVs are dubbed the “QX”.

Could one of the Detroit auto makers blown the whistle on Hyundai and Kia’s mileage figures? Automotive News seems to think so.

If you need proof that Lincoln really is down right now, here it is: they must be down, because Edmunds is kicking them. The same blog that tossed the Volt’s salad with an enthusiasm worthy of Tom Colicchio has placed its newest MKZ tester into the stocks for a bit of the ol’ public shaming. At the crux of the issue: the disgusting fact that, when fitted with the same tires found on the BMW M5, the Lincoln MKZ outperforms it in the Edmunds slalom test.

Just kidding. There’s more to it than that. Or is there?

Acura’s ILX is 2/3rds of the way to hitting its 30,000 unit annual sales target, and the brand is hoping that the discontinuation of the base car’s 2.0L engine will help kickstart sales.

What’s up.

It’s your boy, JB. You know, the guy who isn’t allowed on your press trips any more. I’m not sure exactly why. It has something to do with me supposedly misusing one of your complimentary hotel rooms as a place to do something besides examine the press kit. I don’t know why it’s a big deal. You’re acting like I put on a satin “dragon suit”, performed immoral deeds using a mudshark, and/or threw a TV out the window. That didn’t happen. I specifically left my satin dragon suit at home that weekend so I can say for sure that it didn’t happen. Maybe that wasn’t it at all. I don’t know. We don’t need to discuss it now. Just censure me and move on.

Plus, it isn’t like you guys haven’t made mistakes yourselves, and more recently, too. I mean, Jimmy Fallon? Curating Tweets? CURATING TWEETS? JIMMY FALLON “CURATING” TWEETS? I need you to stop reading this letter right now so you can go home, cut out a section of your garden hose and savagely beat whoever came up with that idea until they can’t walk any more. Wait. Make that “type”. Can’t type any more. That’s especially important. Because I think that idea probably originated with them typing an e-mail to someone, and until that can’t happen again none of us are safe.

Nearly everyone was unanimous in their assessment that Lincoln’s re-branding campaign is an unmitigated disaster unfolding in slow motion; from the name change to Lincoln Motor Company to the bizarre tie-up with Jimmy Fallon and the marketing-buzzword laden BS the whole thing reeks of inaction disguised in the form of sophisticated marketing efforts.

The most interesting angle in this mess is the fact that American luxury cars are in such a shambles that Lincoln’s biggest threat doesn’t really come from Cadillac, but from Ford itself.

Despite the failure of the BMW 5-Series GT, BMW is determined to capture the economies of scale of its rear-drive platform and shoot for unprecedented volume by cranking out even more ugly variants of its core models. Case in point, the 3-Series GT.

The big auto news on Twitter this morning – Lincoln is now known as “Lincoln Motor Company”, and they’ll be rolling out the name change with a brand new Superbowl ad. That’s great, but where’s the product?

Fiat dropped a product onslaught at the LA show, revealing two variants of the 500L, and an Abarth version of the 500C, so I can better sunburn my enormous bald spot.

My experience with the Lexus IS-F was both impressive and rather sterile. I was put in mind of Samuel Johnson’s observation regarding Milton’s Paradise Lost: “[it is] one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

The same might be true of the IS-F… but here’s a fast Lexus that’s not just longer, it’s wider. And taller. And just plain big.

For 2014, the Chevrolet Impala will get a price hike of $850, and the return of an iconic badge that had been absent for years.

The words “Mazda” and “premium” will be forever linked with the stillborn Amati brand in the mind of car enthusiasts. Cancelled at the 11th hour, Amati was supposed to be Mazda’s luxury brand that would go head to head with Infiniti, Lexus and Acura. All we got out of it was the Millenia.

According to a report in the Detroit Free Press, GM North America President Mark Reuss has suggested that Buick might be revising its “tri-shield” logo, which dates to the 1950s. The current all chrome version has been in use for the past decade or so.

MG, now owned by Chinese auto maker SAIC, is apparently gunning for Kia and beyond. But despite their lofty ambitions, MG hasn’t made much headway in the automotive world.

Renault is gearing up to produce a range of cars positioned below Dacia, including a competitor for the Tata Nano.

For many of the brand’s faithful, a front-driver BMW is a revolting prospect. It’s the four-wheeled equivalent of tofu-based bacon or a cigarette without nicotine. But BMW is banking on small cars in a big way – their new front drive architecture, dubbed UKL, will underpin as many as 12 front-drive products from BMW and Mini. And frankly, not doing a front-drive range would be a display of poor judgement on the part of management.

Over a year after the last domestic car dealership left San Francisco, Ford is hoping to gain a foothold in the Bay Area again with a series of “pop-up” showrooms.

“Pop-up” shops are short-term retail spaces located in trendy areas – often times, the temporary nature of the store is also a way to have some presence in an area where a long-term rental agreement would be too expensive. And in a market like San Fransico, where rents are sky high and local consumers are firmly in the “import camp”, a pop-up showroom might not be such a bad idea.

Confession time: the motorized vehicle photograph that adorned my high school locker didn’t have four wheels. It had two. I have always had an interest in bikes, one which has slowly grown from drooling over the 2002 Yamaha R6 (which stayed in my locker through all four years of high school) to buying motorcycle magazines to spending more time reading about bikes than cars. But I’ve yet to buy one for the same reason that kept me from buying a car for so long; insurance.

Being the bearer of bad news isn’t always fun, but sometimes its necessary. Despite sending Audi fanboys into a frenzy with photographs of a real, live RS4 Avant, the likelihood of this car being imported is next to zero. Hit the jump for more pontificating from your favorite enfant terrible know-it-all wagon hater.

Amid flat growth for the ultra-luxury segment, Lamborghini may kill their luxury SUV project to save money.

Apparently, Honda invited some journalists to Japan so they could go check out new technology carefully packaged into existing cars, lest anyone reveal super-secret things like what the next Acura RL looks like. No matter, we’ve got everything below.

It’s been a little while since we checked in on GM’s A-Car experiment, the Chevrolet Spark. After some cringe-worthy initial attempts at marketing the Spark, we are now getting some early data, and the takeaway is this; sales aren’t so bad, but the demographics of Spark owners aren’t quite what GM wanted.

Well, we knew this one was inevitable. A compliant filed in Ohio court against Hyundai and Kia due to their overly optimistic fuel economy claims.

American Suzuki Motor Corp may have gone bust, but Suzuki cars will continue to be sold in Canada, where the SX4, Kizashi and Grand Vitara are still offered (but not the Equator pickup).

Hyundai and Kia being called on the carpet for inflated fuel economy claims is a great story for a slow Friday; everybody likes to see a rising star get taken down a notch, and the two Koreans have been the Cinderella story of the auto industry for the last couple of years.

Small wonder then, that in 2010, TTAC reported on some suspect fuel economy figures over in Detroit, similar to what happened with Hyundai/Kia. And nothing was ever done about it.

The Cadillac Escalade, perhaps the decade’s most prolific monument to conspicuous consumption, will be going in a different direction for its next generation. GM’s Mark Reuss described the new Escalade as “much less ostentatious”.

Putting an end to the vicious cycle of rumors and conjecture, Mazda’s sports car chief revealed that they will bring back the RX-7 in 2017, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Cosmo sports car.

“Take BMW. In the near term, they will have nine entries in the compact segment. This is basically our heartland,” he told me on the sidelines of the Paris auto show. “With the brand reputation they have, you start to have a massive problem.”

-Gunnar Herrmann, Ford of Europe’s Vice President of Quality

Chinese performance and graphic artist Liu Bolin is known as the invisible man. He has himself photographed after he’s dressed and painted himself to almost completely blend into the background. Besides any deeper philosophical implications about the state of man in his work, the photographs are visually arresting and wryly clever. Someone at Ford or their ad agency must also be clever because they got an inspired idea: hire Bolin to make the dramatically styled 2013 Ford Fusion stand out in consumers’ minds by painting the Fusion’s competitors into the background. I think it’s a brilliant concept, but then I’ve used the portmanteau Camcordata myself to describe the relatively indistinguishable cars in the midsize sedan market. Making the Fusion’s competitors literally blend into the background effectively gets the message across that the Fusion is different. Do you agree?

Is Ford about to re-name the Lincoln brand? A Detroit News reporter asked Jim Farley that question point blank, and his answer was evasive.

A Kia Sportage owner in the UK was in for a surprise after he found out that the “full leather” interior in his Kia Sportage was actually “…mainly plastic or vinyl.”

Your humble author was charmed by the regular Juke when it debuted, but the Juke-R is a very different animal and it costs about twenty-five times what the standard Juke does. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any customers…

The Land Rover Defender commands fairly hefty prices on the used market, thanks to its brief tenure in our marketplace and its classic styling. But the revived Defender, set to debut in 2015, will not only come to America, but serve as the brand’s entry-level model.

Ferraris are expensive, Porsches (usually) less so. This is something that every kid on the street knows, right? Turns out that it is, as the song says, truer than true.

The introduction of the Buick Verano Turbo is right around the corner, and that could spell doom for the Buick Regal, which has seen sales plunge by 37 percent this year.

It’s been almost a year since the Internet was treated to the story of a boy, a girl, and a dodgy take on a dead supercar. The story had all the makings of a classic tale: ambition, speed, deceit, accusation, busty Asian women in leopard-skin print outfits dancing on top of cars in the desert.

Well, the story isn’t quite over yet.

Strong demand is spurring Chevrolet to import more Chevrolet Spark minicars from Korea – though Chevrolet won’t release their initial projections or how many Sparks will be imported in the next round.

(NSFW Language)

Chrysler is launching a series of “buzz cars”, a fancy name for special edition package that will ostensibly maintain consumer interest in their cars as they progress over the model cycle.

We haven’t had the chance to thrash the newest M5 around a racetrack yet, but Autoblog has been granted the privilege of running “nine-tenths” around both the Ascari course (in the DCT) and Laguna Seca (in the new six-speed manual variant). What do they have to say for themselves?

TTAC Reader Richard responds to Derek’s Scion Metalhead Marketing piece from the perspective of a car lover and metal fan

” ‘Entrails ripped from a virgin’s c**t,’ ” I thought to myself. Toyota wants to play patron to a musical genre that has spawned songs like ‘Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s C**t’ and ‘Christraping Black Metal.’ What are they thinking?”

My disbelief at Scion AV’s announcement echoed across heavy metal fandom. If there’s such a thing as collective cognitive dissonance, Scion AV caused it. Nobody could believe that Toyota was going to do this. What did heavy metal have to do with selling cars? And why would Toyota risk its stodgy and safe image on promoting itself via heavy metal, even if done through the ‘edgy’ and ‘youth-oriented’ Scion brand?

Coming straight out of the “I can’t believe people get paid for this nonsense” department is Scion’s new marketing initiative; picking heavy metal-listeners as its next target demographic.

Long-time TTAC readers will recall my infatuation with Couch Guitar Straps and their MB-Tex “upcycled” products. Couch doesn’t just do Benz-based stuff, however; they make a very popular guitar strap from Fleetwood Talisman roof vinyl and various other products from Ford trunk linings, VW Beetle seat vinyl, and Seventies Pontiac upholstery.

This morning, Couch spammed me with something about a limited run of bright-green upcycled-from-seatbelts guitar straps, and while I was reflexively clicking the “Buy Now!” button like Pavlov’s pup I noticed a few new items for the Murilee Martin crowd.

When TTAC’s reliability scribe Michael Karesh bought a used Taurus X a few years ago, he was able to get it as a nearly-new car for about half of the original retail price. It’s not hard to understand why; the Taurus X, which combined the high “hip point” from the vaguely-Volvo-based Ford Five Hundred with a rather humpbacked wagon profile, was showroom poison and widely derided by automotive journalists who were in the full flush of an industry-loved love affair with “crossovers”.

Those same journos are now competing to pile the greatest number of accolades on the “Panamera Sport Turismo” concept, presumably because there are going to be some awesome European press trips involved for the writers who can generate the most suction, er, traction on the topic.

The Segway was supposed to be the future of urban transportation, but here’s a better idea:

Long-time TTAC readers know of my sentimental fondness for Crain Communication’s Jamie LaReau. Now the first lady of automotive journalism has uncovered some interesting news about Lincoln’s continuing attempts to, like, do crazy stuff, man.

Nissan’s NV200 has stepped over the extremely low bar set out for it by the notorious New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. From now on, all retired cabs must be replaced by the Mexican-assembled minivan.

Hey kids! Are you feeling nostalgic for the old Celebrity Eurosport? Well then — line right up!

We would also like to point out that importing and/or driving a vehicle with the Martini Racing design film package on public roads could have legal consequences

Now that Porsche has that humdinger of a disclaimer out of the way, they’d like to sell you one of the 918 examples of the 918 Spyder. Preferably one with the Weissach Package. No, not the Weissach Edition. The Weissach Package. As in, you’re going to have to start taking Marlo’s package on your corner so you and all your hoppers can live long enough to buy an example of this fine sporting hybrid.

‘Our aim is not necessarily to be the fastest in absolute top speed but to be the quickest and most rewarding series production road car on a circuit’, says McLaren Automotive Managing Director Antony Sheriff. ‘It is the true test of a supercar’s all round ability and a much more important technical statement. Our goal is to make the McLaren P1 the most exciting, most capable, most technologically advanced and most dynamically accomplished supercar ever made.’

Oh McLaren, you so crazy!

I mean it.

You’re crazy. Like, if you think supercar buyers will make any purchase decision based on your in-house road-course lap times, you’re really crazy.

Chevrolet threw a lot of money at the marketing plan for the Daewoo Kalos all-new Sonic. Any time there’s money in the air, it’s like blood in the water; it brings the sharks. Flirtatious sharks, who know that it’s best to play hard to get. They start by winking across the bar at the mark. Then there’s a brief bit of dangerously witty banter, followed by the frantic, drunken consummation. What’s after that? The payoff, of course: a sponsored conversation, a cross-promotion, the messy, wet details of a cash exchange.

And then there’s the hip way.

A hot tip from a few friends in my generational cohort, the ones who don’t drive or have any interest in motoring. They all love this ad for the Dodge Dart and encouraged me to check it out.

What’s so unreasonable about using smartphones to arrange a taxi ride? Uber, an application which allows prospective riders to arrange rides with “black car” sedans or conventional taxis using their iPhones, arrived in New York this week — but the city bureaucrats have already fired a warning shot across Uber’s bow.

Owners of Saab cars who replace their vehicles are choosing Hondas over other OEMs , according to a study of “defections” by automotive consultancy Polk.

People keep their eyes on automaker incentives for various reasons. Customers are hunting deals. Analysts hunt carmakers that are sitting on a glut of cars. Incentive numbers don’t always tell the full story, says Edmunds. In August, incentive spend was subdued and stable. Automakers and dealers have become adept in camouflage though, and the reported stability of incentive spending doesn’t factor in some of the “hidden incentives.”

TTAC has some great Mustang coverage coming your way in about a week, including multiple tests of two different Shelby GT500 models ranging from a 168-mph blast down the back straight of Virginia International Raceway to a pedestrian-frightening growl through the streets of downtown Toronto. We’re busy writing apology notes to Ford for the state of the tires on the VIR car — are those cords? — so in the meantime we’ll distract you with this question: What’s faster around a racetrack: a “drift car” or a “race car”? In this video, NASA regional director Chris Cobetto and awesome drift dude Vaughn Gittin, Jr. try to create some suspense out of a foregone conclusion. There’s a more exciting video — for road racers, anyway — after the jump.

The winners of Nissan’s GT Academy have been chosen. To nobody’s surprise in particular, their group photograph is completely unsuitable for this site. Turns out that the Internet is a little short on hot girls or street-wise African-American dudes who are totes into racing imaginary cars online. Oh well. Now, the shortlist of digital Sennas is off to try their hand at driving some real cars.