#3WTP

Carnewschina.com presents our first look at… no, that’s not a Jetta, it’s a stretched Polo sedan. What, you had a hard time telling the difference? That’s China for you...

With GM’s share price currently hovering below $25, well under its $33 IPO price, The General is holding its second annual Global Business Conference in hopes of encouraging investors the world over to buy into its turnaround. A webcast is currently streaming over at the GM Investor Relations website, but the key points are available in slides available in PDF here. The presentation involves nearly every level of GM’s business, so listening in and reading the entire PDF is going to be the best way to make sense of what GM is trying to communicate… but if you just want an overview, check out the gallery below for a few hand-picked slides, illustrating some of the more important points.

For the first minute and ten seconds or so of this video, you might be thinking “so what, it’s just an SUV with quad pipes?” After the 1:10 mark, though, when the development mule for the new Mercedes ML63 AMG starts flying around the track, you may just begin to wonder if the laws of physics are being bent. There’s something a little distressing about watching a 5,000+ lb ute tucking through tight corners, as if the car guy’s traditional fetish for light weight were suddenly revealed to be some kind of cruel joke. But perhaps what’s really bothering me is that I know I’ll never see one of these things driven this way, unless some famous football player commits a heinous crime of some kind and leads cops on a modern, high-speed update of OJ Simpson’s infamous chase. In which case, I’d say this might just be the vehicle to have.

Between Consumer Reports’ decision to drop the Honda Civic from its “recommended” list, the poor financial numbers, increased competition from Detroit, Wolfsburg and Korea and the chaos of the tsunami (not to mention the Toyota recall scandal), there are plenty of signs that the land of the rising sun is losing its grip on the US car market. But is the slide inexorable, or can Japan rally to regain its dominance? Here, via Automotive News [sub], is a graphic that projects the product cadence of Japan’s “big three” over model-years 2012-2015… does it give you hope for Japan, or do you see signs of continued struggles?

If Saab survives long enough, it plans on developing three new vehicles which China’s Youngman Auto will build in China, including a 9-6X midsize crossover SUV. But, as it turns out, a 9-6X already exists… at the museum in Trollhättan. Auto Motor und Sport reports that six years after Saab did the hard work of re-badging a Subaru Tribeca, the firm has brought the prototype out of storage to show… I don’t know, what might have happened had GM kept its stake in Fuji Heavy Industries? The good news is that the Tribeca almost makes more sense as a Saab. In fact, it almost makes you wonder why Subaru didn’t just buy Saab, since it basically stole the Swedish brand’s college-town-lefty market niche. The bad news: Saab’s forthcoming made-in-China 9-6X probably won’t be as good as this cynical GM-era rebadge. Oh well, perhaps this six-year-old reminder of Saab’s extended decline will help the faithful get over their terminally ill Swedish patient…

As the Porsche brand has expanded in recent years to include sedans and SUVs, and as overpriced special editions and cynically neutered products propped up an increasingly bloated pricing structure, Porsche fans have had plenty of opportunities to wonder “what are those guys smoking?” And now, thanks to Autoblog, we have part of the answer: we may not know exactly what Porsche is smoking, but we know what they’re smoking it out of. According to Porsche Design’s presser

The extraordinary Porsche Design Shisha combines high-quality materials such as aluminium, stainless steel and glass with the timeless and unique design approach of the luxury brand. Puristic and stylish at the same time. The Porsche Design Shisha is made in Germany and stands at a height of 55 centimetres. It only shows a discreet branding on the aluminium top of the Shisha and comes with a long flexible tube made out of TecFlex material, which is also used for the classic Porsche Design TecFlex writing tools.

So… when is Chrysler going to get in on this cross-branding opportunity?

Based on spyshots and patent drawings obtained from Al Volante, Auto Motor und Sport was able to commission what is probably an accurate depiction of the next-gen Fiat Panda from Schulte Design, giving us an early look at a small car that will provide the basis for Chrysler’s long-awaited foray into subcompact cars. Chrysler’s product plan [ PDF] calls for 2013 model year subcompact (B-Segment) vehicles for the Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler brands, based on Fiat platforms. The Chrysler-branded model was supposed to be a rebadge of the Lancia Ypsilon (itself very similar to the Fiat 500), but that model is reportedly on hold. The Dodge and Jeep B-Segment offerings are still on though, and the Jeep has long been thought to be a lightly-facelifted version of the Panda 4X4, meaning this model could be an early look at the smallest-ever Jeep.