(January 16, 2010) Fisker Automotive, a venture-capital luxury electric carmaker, said on Friday it had raised $115.3 million in new private equity funding to develop its Karma plug-in hybrid and lower-cost electric vehicles, according to a Reuters report.

(January 15, 2010) General Motors is increasing spending on its next-generation light-duty, full-sized truck program to create more fuel-efficient, more attractive pickups, the Automotive News reports. The re-engineered and restyled light-duty Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups are expected to debut around the 2013 model year. The pickup program had been put on hold prior to GM's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The trucks now will land in showrooms at about the same time as originally planned.

(January 14, 2010) While the U.S. automotive industry is still cool to diesel-powered vehicles, it has not affected Volkswagen.

The German maker’s diesel-powered products continue to gain ground, encouraging VW to add the powertrain as an option on even more of its models, going forward, said Stephan Jacoby, CEO of Volkswagen of America, at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit this week.

“With any new vehicle that arrives with a diesel option,” Jacoby said, “we estimate 20 to 30 percent of the mix will be diesel.”

(January 13, 2010) HIROSHIMA, Japan — Mazda today delivered a Mazda Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid to Iwatani Corporation, an energy development company based in Japan. The Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid is Mazda’s latest hydrogen rotary engine (RE) vehicle which uses hydrogen as a fuel and features a unique hybrid system