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A little birdie with very big wings told me some fascinating stuff about the Toyota recall crisis recently. It was in direct response to what I wrote in the mag this week about Toyota having to fit black box data recorders to its roads cars “to protect itself in court against its own customers.”

According to my source this is not, and never will be, the reason why Toyota fits data recorders to its cars. Toyota, says the source (and you can probably guess which Japanese car company he works for), has and never will do anything to actively protect itself against its customers.

I would like to have been at yesterday’s BMW financial press conference to hear CEO Norbert Reithofer admit that the BMW brand was gearing up to produce a range of small front-drive cars.

The carmaker has agonised over the front-wheel drive question before. In the early 1990s, BMW built a number of front-drive 3-series prototypes. Back in those days, before the premium brand boom, BMW was a much smaller company.

What is it with German carmakers and four-door cabriolets? Our discovery of patent drawings for a topless Porsche Panamera is the latest in a series of wild proposals that started with the very limited run Maybach Landaulet.

In 2007 Mercedes revealed the Ocean Drive, a true four-seater convertible with a folding fabric roof. The global crunch probably but paid to that S-class based idea, but there are also rumors around that Audi would like to do something similar on its upcoming A7 big four-door fastback.

‘Premium downsizing’ is one of the hottest buzzwords in the car industry. The theory is that premium car buyers are willing to either drive smaller cars or drive the same size car with a smaller engine.

The first ‘premium downsized’ car was probably the Mercedes A-class back in 1998. Although technically innovative, the project ran up huge losses for Mercedes. The new-generation A-class will be more conventional under the skin and spawn a wider choice of models.

The news that Wolfgang Bernhard is going to head up Merc’s van division and production caught my eye.
Bernhard, you see, is a disciple of Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche. The old man took him to Detroit to help run Chrysler after the Daimler Chrysler merger, and Bernhard also has run the VW brand and, ironically, been integral in Cerberus’s takeover of Chrysler when Daimler abandoned ship.

The reason his appointment caught my eye is that there have been a lot of rumours that Zetsche won’t be running Merc for too much longer. It's nothing to do with his effectiveness as the boss, mind you, but tragically his wife has recently lost a battle with cancer. And who could blame him for feeling differently about work after such a loss?

Just as our Chinese colleagues were getting their first taste of the new MG6, I was spearing up the M40 on my way to my first visit to Longbridge for nearly a decade.

Ironically, my last visit was to see the results of MG’s rebirth at the hands of the Phoenix Four. We were shown the MG R, S and T which were all whizzed up versions of the rather more prosaic Rover products.