Kia MPV to debut on Geneva motor show

Kia has just announced the introduction of a new concept vehicle for the Geneva Motor Show. The Korean automaker was light on details, saying only that it will be “a great looking MPV” with a “unique glass roof treatment.”

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Toyota Losses deepens

Toyota expects to make an operating loss this year three times greater than initially thought, the company has announced.

The company has amended its turnover forecast for 2009, changing the 150 billion yen (£1.1bn) operating loss predicted in late December to 450 billion yen (£3.3bn).

The world’s biggest car manufacturer also has a growing problem of over capacity, and has slashed its vehicle output predictions for 2008/2009 by 1.55 million units since the start of the financial year.

Toyota now expects to produce 7.32 million vehicles by the end of March.

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China is now World biggest car market

China is poised to overtake the US as the world’s biggest car-market in 2009, according to estimates released by General Motors.

Based on January’s sales, China’s new car market is forecast to hit 10.7m units by the year’s end, versus 9.8m in the US.

If true, it will mark a further milestone in the meteoric growth of the Chinese new car market, which overtook Japan’s a couple of years ago.

With a population of at least one billion people, China has potentially four times more car buyers than either the US or EU, whose populations are around 240m each.

Today only 200m Chinese are ranked as ‘middle-class’, with a salary big enough to afford a new car, but that figure is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.

GM estimates that new car sales in January in China reached 790,000 units. GM has to estimate the figures because official numbers take a long time to be collated. The equivalent figure for the US was 668,000.

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