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As a Chinese New Year expert, you most likely know where February auto sales in China headed: Down. Knowing how our patent-pending Chinese sales oracle, GM, did, you could also predict that there is a silver lining. And so it happened.

The Geneva Auto Salon is a small show in a small city of a small country. The show is big because it is an annual confab of automakers where shoulders are rubbed, mergers are planned, policies are set. The cars are mostly decoration. A top topic in Geneva was how to meet rigid EU emission limits. “There is a growing awareness that conventional hybrids and slow-selling battery cars simply won’t be enough,” Reuters reports from Geneva.

You won’t be able to send to or receive from *.Cadillac, *.Chevrolet, or *.GMC, while friends of other brands, from Dodge through Toyota, will have that pleasure. General Motors withdrew three applications for what is called a “generic top level domain” or gTLD. Oddly, the applications for Buick and the supposedly illegal Chevy are still on the books.

Hyundai and Buick are feeling the heat in China, and the industry might rethink past practices of freewheeling Twitter snark. Hyundai and a Buick dealer made remarks about the quality of their products after a 2-month-old baby was abducted along with the RAV4 it was in. Chinese commenters did not like it at all.

Despite Audi CEO Rupert Stadler’s warnings that the effect of the Chinese New Year affects the usually glorious Audi numbers, Audi’s February sales still are something to be proud of.

While other carmakers, including electric pioneer Nissan, are downgrading their EV euphoria, GM’s CEO Dan Akerson suddenly sounds uncharacteristically gung-ho on the issue. At an industry conference, he says GM is working on developing an electric car that has a range of as much as 200 miles.

All of you who talked smack about the New Jeep Cherokee, take note: Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne believes in this car, so much that he predicts Chrysler selling more than 800,000 Jeeps worldwide in 2013.

At the Geneva Motor Show, Marchionne told Reuters:

When Toyota gets on the horn by lunchtime to tell Tokyo’s media to show up at 4:30 the same day, everybody knows it will be a big surprise and an even bigger deal. Today, Japan’s Fourth Estate already knew what’s coming when the phone rang. It still was a big deal: Toyota completely reshuffled its top executives. It even brought a non-Japanese on board, a former GM man to boot.

In the good old days, when things were how they were supposed to, the first world got new cars first, and the third world got them three generations later. This time-tested principle is being set on its head. It started as an ugly trend in Japan, where Japanese received their new Latio ages after people in China or Thailand had already wrecked it. Subaru did a similar stunt with the XV. Now this disease is spreading to Europe, and the carrier is the Ford EcoSport.

Today, GM did something highly unusual: It abandoned all spin and said that sales in China were down pretty much across the board in February: “General Motors and its joint ventures sold 215,070 vehicles in China during February. Sales were down 10.6 percent from the same month last year due to the week-long Lunar New Year holiday falling in February this year.” We at TTAC understand.

A U.K. court dismissed a libel lawsuit from Tesla against the BBC show “Top Gear,” Bloomberg reports.

The case had been thrown out before. Tesla appealed.

Not to be outdone by the bull from Wolfsburg, BMW’s adopted super-luxury brand, Rolls Royce, offers its “most powerful and dynamic Rolls-Royce in history.” The Wraith, a car “with just a hint of the noir,” as Rolls says in an email.

The volks who worry about Volkswagen being incapable of directing its big band of brands should make a trip to Geneva. Today, the boys from Wolfsburg launch a barrage at all target groups.

Aimed at the “blogger who drives mother’s old Celica and googles for super car pics” segment, Lamborghini delivers more bull:

Audi’s global deliveries were “clearly lower” than in January, Audi’s CEO Rupert Stadler told Reuters reporter Andreas Cremer in Geneva. Audi’s global sales were up 16.3 percent in January. There won’t be a minus said Stadler, even while fighting the lunar calendar, Audi will report a single digit plus.

Audi’s numbers won’t be the only ones that won’t look as good as the month before.

Mercedes must expand into the smaller segments in a big hurry, never mind the protests from amateur marketing experts that doing so will water down the brand. That brand needs a lot of watering, lest it will shrivel and die. At home in Europe, Daimler’s core customer group on average is around 60 years old. Don’t poo-poo that demographic: There used to be a lot of growth and money in it. However, it is getting frail: The peak of this demographic is soon to retire. Daimler needs to get young stat. Its fountain of youth is a car Reuters dubbed “the last chance saloon” – the CLA.