Auto News 5

Russian new-car sales fell 13 percent in June as an economic crisis driven by low oil prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine continued to hit demand. Registrations for the first six months were down 14 percent.

A Spanish court said Volkswagen Group, based in Germany, would be liable to answer any charges over emissions fraud, rather than its Spanish affiliates.The automaker had said that any probe should be directed at its its units in the country.

Porsche has opened a new engine plant at its main site in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen where 400 workers produce around 200 V8s a day after a EUR80m spend.

FAW reported its sales results for the first-half of 2016: cumulative wholesales increased 8.1% to 1,485m units, retail sales were 1,471m units, up 9.3% year over year.

China's passenger-vehicle sales expanded at a faster pace in the first half as rising demand for crossovers, SUVs and new-energy vehicles widened the nation's lead as the world's biggest auto market.

Although Britain's actual departure from the European Union is still at least two years off and the exit procedure won't be triggered till we have a new prime minister, 'Brexit' is still a key talking point and we've been on it.

Panasonic expects strong demand for lithium ion batteries from Tesla to help more than double its annual sales of automobile-related batteries in three years. The Japanese supplier also plans to accelerate its $1.

Volvo Cars reported a solid double-digit sales increase for the first six months of the year, posting growth of 10.5% to 256,563 cars compared with the same period in 2015. Sales of the XC90 were the main growth driver globally.

Honda is killing off the compact CR-Z hybrid, a slow-selling runabout whose performance struggled to live up to its hot-hatch looks. Production of the made-in-Japan car will end by December. Output for the U.S.

Opinion 10 Jul, 2016

Forget the football - Mike Rutherford's rounding up the car-manufacturing championships - and some of the finalists may surprise you

Renault said its global sales rose 13 percent to a new record of 1.57 million vehicles in the first half of the year, as a product offensive helped it to outpace a recovering European market.

The EU threatened to hit Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Iran and Brazil with tariffs on a type of steel known as hot-rolled coil, highlighting concerns about job losses in the EU industry.

VW Group's technical fix for the Audi Q5, one of the vehicles involved in its diesel-emissions cheating scandal, did not reduce harmful pollution in a new test, a European consumer group said.

A German business group has lowered its sights for exports to Britain, forecasting a darkening trade outlook as the impact of Britons' vote to leave the EU seeps into the eurozone economy. Britain is Germany's fifth-biggest trading partner for goods.

After negotiations over previous months, the governments of Brazil and Argentina concluded talks on sector trade within Mercosur late in June. Once again, the Brazilian position was for free trade, as predicted since 2000, but always postponed at Argentine negotiators' request as this was seen to Brazil's trade balance advantage. Several postponements followed and even a regime of reciprocal value quotas was set at one point.

News 8 Jul, 2016

Six German carmakers and parts suppliers have been raided by antitrust officials over suspicions of colluding to fix the price of steel

Alfa Romeo claims its new Giulia has better driving dynamics than rivals such as the BMW 3 series because the standard models were derived from the car's Quadrifoglio performance version rather than the other way around.

The Ford F-150 topped all pickups in Twitter engagement in June, a month where Chevrolet launched a new ad campaign that jabbed the toughness of the F-150's stamped aluminum bed.

AutoNation purchased four stores -- selling BMW, Land Rover and Jaguar brands -- in Westchester County, N.Y.

VW will pay an additional $86 million in penalties to California over its diesel emissions violations, on top of a settlement of about $15 billion that the automaker reached with U.S. officials last week.