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Volkswagen Group believes it can sell over 10 million vehicles in 2014, with hopes of overtaking Toyota as the world's largest automaker in the process. If VW can do it, it would meet that goal four years earlier than planned. Of course, Toyota isn't sitting still – it also hopes to top the 10 million-car threshold this year and has the advantage of already holding the top spot.

"With rising volume and new models, we will increasingly see positive earnings effects as well," said VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn during its annual press conference, according to Automotive News. The company is spending huge amounts of money to propel it to the top, investing 84.2 billion euros ($117 billion) through 2018, and according to AN it plans to introduce over 100 new models worldwide among all of its brands by the end of next year.

The German automaker may get an extra boost as the European car industry shows signs of emerging from its yearlong stagnation and China continues to grow. In January, VW Group was up 8.5 percent in Europe and 15.5 percent in China, according to its own figures. However, the US has been slowing with Volkswagen brand sales down 19.04 percent in January and down 13.81 percent in February.

VW Group sold 9.73 million vehicles in 2013, which barely topped General Motors with 9.71 million. That includes the German's heavy truck sales; an earlier report showed that the company had sold 9.5 million light vehicles last year. Toyota predicts it is going to sell 10.32 million cars in 2014, up 4 percent. If either VW or Toyota hits its goals, it would mark the first time ever than any automaker has sold 10 million models in 12 months.

We've reached out to VW for comment and are awaiting a reply. We'll update this post if and when we hear back.

The investigation that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened into the Jeep Liberty in October 2013 has been closed. NHTSA received two (!) complaints about fires starting in the driver's door, thought to be caused by the master power window switch. The initial estimate was that 80,000 Libertys could be roped into a possible recall, but according to a report in the Detroit News the agency examined records for 425,000 Chrysler products that used the same window switch, including the Dodge Nitro and Chrysler Town & Country minivan.

After canvassing 265 warranty claims related to the master switches, NHTSA concluded that the rate of fires compared to the "large population of vehicles" was rather low, and that there was no trend pattern behind the few issues it did find. Perhaps with that, and the closure of the trailer hitch investigation, the Liberty can finally rest in peace.

Rashad Charjuan Owens, the driver who crashed through police barricades and into a crowd of people celebrating the SXSW festivities in Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring dozens more, has been charged with capital murder and may get the death penalty. Owens may also face multiple counts of aggravated assault by vehicle after hitting pedestrians, a woman on a moped, a man on a bicycle, a taxi and a van.

The 21-year-old had been driving the wrong way down a one-way street in an attempt to evade police, who had tried to pull him over on suspicion of drunk driving. After the accident, Owens attempted to flee on foot before being captured by police wielding Tasers. His bond sits at $3 million, according to CNN.

Witnesses on the scene have described the harrowing event as "like something out of a movie." Videos, some graphic, have been uploaded to YouTube and social media, making this accident stand out in the minds of Americans. A video report from CNN can be seen here, but as we said, some footage may be disturbing.

Efficient cars are all the rage these days, but Joe Kyte has made a business of crafting some of the coolest green cars around – literally. Kyte is better known by his nickname Topiary Joe, and in addition to being a talented artist, he is also a real gearhead.

Kyte has been creating topiaries for the last 20 years. It began when he was marketing greenhouse products to Walt Disney World and saw their plant sculptures. He realized that he could do that and since then, has done around 3,400 pieces.

His most intriguing creations are the rolling sculptures that move and turn. Prices for those start at about $18,000 and can be as high as $30,000. While, the wheels are machine-bent, Kyte said all the other parts are done with a table vice and a Lincoln Electric arc welder. Topiary Joe is taking the Porsche (pictured above) to Palm Beach later this year to sell or says he may donate it to Porsche North America. If you really want it, the sculpture is currently on Craigslist for sale for $24,000.

Topiary Joe has also had a life-long love of cars. "I was driving my first MG Midget before I was 14," he told Autoblog. He grew up in Oak Ridge, TN, where the Manhattan Project was partially developed. He says the town was full of recent college grads driving Mercedes, and he caught the bug. His automotive mentor was a nuclear physicist who taught him to repair and restore the Mercs.

Kyte has completed commissions for Sandals Resort, Dreamworks, Absolut, and many more. Among his favorite creations is the Ferrari that he created at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix that is now exhibited at the airport each year before the race. Check out his website for a wider look at his work.

No more having to work through brokers or call your people in Europe when you want to trade up to this year's Koenigsegg, now that the Swedish supercar syndicate has appointed New York's Manhattan Motorcars to be its first US dealer. Putting high priority on the company it keeps, this will put the Agera R in a Gotham classroom alongside pupils from Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce. All the better for it to get called on when it raises its hand for potential buyers.

Those buyers will need to get it out of the city, though, if they really want to use it. The twin-turbocharged, 5.0-liter V8 behind the Agera's cockpit is good for 960 horsepower on regular gas, or 1,140 when primed with E85. And we don't expect that those one-piece carbon fiber wheels will enjoy Manhattan's mean streets, even with the swanky Öhlins Racing Triplex suspension.

This is your cue to head down for a test drive with your trade-in and a Vuitton bag filled with roughly $1.5 million. Or you can take your time and start with the press release on the appointment below.

Nissan is giving us the first tease of its creatively named New Sedan Concept that is premiering at the Beijing Motor Show on April 20. The single image shows the vehicle wearing a diaphanous robe that is just translucent enough to make out its headlights, V-shaped grille and badge. The rest is still a mystery.

The New Sedan Concept is aimed at young, digitally focused Chinese buyers, according to Nissan. Its look came from a collaboration between the company's design centers in China and Japan and was led by Chief Creative Officer Shiro Nakamura. However, the teaser certainly makes the New Sedan look a lot like the Sport Sedan Concept from the 2014 Detroit Auto Show. Hopefully, this is truly a new model and not just a repaint.

Scroll down for the full press release and a video of executive design director Mamoru Aoki discussing the new concept and previous ones.

Sponsors come and sponsors go in Formula One, but they tend to stick around awhile at McLaren. The team ran under Marlboro title sponsorship for 22 years from 1974 to 1996, and Hugo Boss has been with the team for 33 years now since 1981. But it's the team's partnership with Mobil 1 which it will celebrate with the sinister livery pictured here.

With Vodafone having left the team at the end of last season, McLaren is without a title sponsor for this season, and was expected to return to its heritage orange livery for this year's championship. But instead it's starting the season at the Australian Grand Prix with this silver and black livery to celebrate two decades of partnership with ExxonMobil.

It may not be quite as sweet as the new Williams Martini Racing livery, but it is pretty slick. Whether it stands a chance of finishing on the podium this weekend, however, is another matter. While McLaren has won the Australian Grand Prix a dozen times – more than any other team – and Jenson Button is one of the winningest drivers in the history of the Aussie race, he and the team haven't been showing too well in pre-season testing.

After decades of cat-and-mouse battle waged between Holden and Ford, Australia's V8 Supercars series has expanded considerably. Mercedes and Nissan both joined the grid last season, and Volvo has followed suit this year. So when 2014 championship kicked off earlier this month in Adelaide, everyone was watching to see who would come out on top.

The answer is Holden, which took first place in all three of the weekend's races. In fact the General Motors division locked out the podium in the first and third races and took first and third places in the second race, letting just one other manufacturer onto the podium the entire weekend – and that was Volvo. The Polestar S60 scored second place on its first race weekend, beating all the Nissan Altimas, the Mercedes E63 AMGs, the Ford Falcons and most of the Holden Commodores.

Now that's hardly winning the championship, but it's a very solid debut. And that point was not lost on the people back at headquarters in Sweden, who are already thinking about making a roadgoing version of the race-spec V8 Supercar.

Speaking with Aussie car site Motoring.com.au, Volvo R&D chief Peter Mertens hinted that such a project is being developed, although it likely wouldn't be based on the current S60. Instead it would have to wait on the next-gen model that will share its Scalable Product Architecture with the upcoming new XC90. That could take some time, but we're sure that the engineers at Polestar aren't wasting any time getting it ready. In the meantime the S60 Polestar with its 345-horsepower turbo six will just have to suffice.

Motorcycle sidecars are a fairly rare sight on American roads, sad as it may be. What's rarer is dogs in motorcycle sidecars. Yes, it seems that when we take our four-legged friends on the road, they're tucked safely into their cages or strapped into some convoluted doggy harness. But some intrepid motorcyclists are combining their love of the open road with their love of their dogs, and a pair of independent filmmakers are documenting the whole thing.

Sit Stay Ride: The Story of America's Sidecar Dogs is the project of Eric Ristau and Geneva Liimatta, a husband-and-wife film team that's aiming to travel across the country and document riders that enjoy bringing their canines along for the ride. Using a set of "doggles" (doggy goggles), the dogs ride shotgun in the sidecar. Think of it as this, only with motorcycles.

"Seeing a dog in a sidecar brings a smile to everyone's face," said Liimatta. "Our film explores the relationship between sidecar dogs and their motorcycle-riding humans. The dogs and humans we've met while shooting this project are amazing characters. You'll love them all."

The film is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for production expenses, find different subjects for the film and help promote animal welfare organizations.

"Many of the dogs featured in this film were adopted from the Humane Society and other incredible organizations," said Ristau. "This is an important message we're trying to send. We want people to adopt dogs and other animals, and also to support agencies that find homes for these pets."

We've included the Kickstarter video from the pair, which details the project, as well as an official press release. Take a look below for both of those things, and then head over to the donation page and chip in.

Porsche was first rumored to be working on a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version of the Cayenne over a year ago. However, we had never seen it, until now. The new model was caught almost completely undisguised while testing. In another stroke of luck, we got a glimpse of the upcoming facelift for Porsche's SUV (pictured above) as well.

According to the spy shooter, it was windy during the cars' cold weather testing. The cover blew off of the facelifted Cayenne, and there was enough time to snap these pictures before it could be hidden again. The changes are all quite minor but jive with what we saw the last time it was spied. The rear still wears some cladding but is expected to be hiding lights similar to the Macan.

The second gallery shows off the upcoming Cayenne PHEV. It looks nearly identical to the standard model, except for the extra panel on the driver's side of the car that hides the electric port. One image even shows the car plugged in. The new version is expected to use the same supercharged 3.0-liter V6 and 9.4-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack with a combined 416 horsepower and 435 pound-feet of torque from the Panamera S E-Hybrid. We enjoyed the system when we tested it last year. It's rumored to debut on the SUV sometime this year.

It's a good time to be in the luxury car business. In Volkswagen Group's financial report for the 2013 fiscal year, it is revealed that that Porsche enjoyed an operating margin of 18 percent. That means the Stuttgart brand made on average about $23,200 per car sold, according to BusinessWeek. Bentley wasn't far behind, and Audi (which was combined with Lamborghini) posted a 10.1 percent margin. This compares to only around 2.9 percent for the Volkswagen brand.

"Luxury brands are on fire," said Dave Sullivan, an industry analyst at AutoPacific. He said that the average profit margin is between six and eight percent. Brands like Porsche and Bentley have the benefit of competing in rarefied markets. Buyers looking at one their vehicles have fewer models to shop against and don't care as much about price. They can also charge more for options, which further boosts income, according to BusinessWeek.

In a way, we should be more impressed by the continued success from Audi. Its models generally have direct competitors in every segment from the other premium automakers. Plus, their buyers aren't the captains of industry who are shopping for a Bentley. Still, the Four Rings is leading rivals in sales so far this year.

Don't expect premium car sales to begin falling anytime soon. The world economy is slowly improving. "As developing nations develop and people start new businesses there is a growing demand for status," said Sullivan. VW Group isn't stagnating either. It announced plans in the report for 10 new models by the end of next year, including higher-end entries like the Audi A4, Q7, Porsche Macan and plug-in hybrid Cayenne. It clearly knows which vehicles are keeping the lights on.

The FARS analysis didn't take into account fatal accidents where the airbags weren't supposed to deploy.

Earlier today, we reported that the actual death toll attributable to GM's ignition switch problem had crested the 300 mark according to new research, well up from the original reports of 12 to 13 deaths. Now, word is breaking that the US government database that informed the study that the report was based on may have significantly overstated the correlation between the study and the GM recall.

The initial study was conducted by Friedman Research on behalf of the Center for Auto Safety, and used something called the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System. To recap, the study claimed that over a 10-year period, 303 people were killed in Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion coupes and sedans when their airbags failed to deploy. These undeployed airbags were then linked to GM's ignition switch recall, which as we've explained before, can turn the ignition out of the "run" position and into the "off" or "accessory" position, disabling the airbags in the process.

Now, according to a report from The Detroit News, which cites research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Study Center for Trauma and EMS at the University of Maryland, the FARS analysis didn't take into account fatal accidents in conditions where the airbags weren't supposed to deploy (which isn't to say crashes and deaths weren't caused by loss of control from the ignition switching off in the GM vehicles). According to the report, this was a significant number of the cases.

There is another potential problem, too. According to that same report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration uses both FARS and another database on fatalities, called the National Automotive Sampling System/Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS). Where FARS uses what the DetNews calls "not always reliable" police data to record vehicular deaths within 30 days of a crash, NASS/CDS relies on what's known as a probability sample. It collects data on 5,000 crashes each year – including some found in the FARS database – to calculate a probability figure.

According to a 2009 IIHS study, "Among crashes common to both databases, NASS/CDS reported deployments for 45 percent of front occupant deaths for which FARS had coded nondeployments." In plain English, FARS doesn't provide a reliable count airbag deployments.

"The bottom line is at least for the years we looked at it, the coding of airbag deployments isn't always accurate," the study's author, IIHS Senior Vice President for Research Anne McCaratt told The News. "It's frustrating because it seems like police reports would be able to code accurately whether an airbag deploys or not. It's not like trying to figure out if the driver fell asleep."

At this point, it remains unclear how many deaths are attributable to the GM ignition switch flaw. It's possible that the number of total deaths may be far fewer than the 303 claimed by the Friedman Research/CAS study we covered earlier (although it may climb back past that number once deaths across all models are included), though it's likely still higher than the 12 to 13 cases thus far acknowledged by GM. With this latest turn, though, the issue becomes cloudier and cloudier.

The first lights-out of the 2014 Formula One season can be measured in hours, not months. If you've heard anything about pre-season testing you know that even the teams are expecting carnage - Fernando Alonso at Ferrari, who's had a comparatively good pre-season, said "the first priority is to finish." Christian Horner, team principal at Infiniti Red Bull Racing, has said he wouldn't be surprised if Mercedes AMG Petronas driver Lewis Hamilton finishes the first race two laps ahead of the field.

The power units have been the root of the off-season mess, and in case you're not clear on how they work - or don't work, as teams are finding - the Mercedes team has provided a video laying it out. The turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 has to work with two power units, one that collects brake energy and one that collects turbo energy for a battery called the "energy store," all of which is meant to help go a race distance using about 33 percent less fuel than last year. For the teams that actually make it race distance, at least.

You can watch the video below.

Toyota has filed a petition with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asking for a waiver to avoid recalling about 206,271 2012–2014 Camry, Avalon, Corolla, Sienna, Tundra and Tacoma vehicles, some of its most popular models. The affected vehicles contain seat heaters that might not meet government flammability standards. Toyota says in the waiver that "the chance of fire or flame induced by a malfunctioning seat heater is essentially zero," according to The Detroit News. The automaker notes the part makes up less than one percent of the seat's weight.

Initial reports of the problem arose in late January when Toyota issued a stop-sale order for 2013 and 2014 model year versions of those vehicles. The automaker says that there have no been reports of fires or injuries in the affected cars, and the problem was discovered during testing by the South Korean government, according to The Detroit News.

We've reached out to Toyota for comment on this development and are awaiting a reply. We'll update this post if and when we hear back.