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Cadillac is bringing a new concept to Pebble Beach

Cadillac will debut a new concept Thursday in Monterey. The company also released teaser video, but it only shows us a few glimpses of interior parts and a concept drawing that seems to show a very minimalistic dashboard. The big draw appears to be the large screen filling in for instruments and infotainment. According to Cadillac, the screens are curved OLED panels co-developed with LG, and the technology behind them will appear in a future Cadillac. Bringing a new concept to the famous Monterey Car Week is a return to form for Cadillac. In past years the company brought beautiful concepts like the full-size, four-door Ciel convertible, and the taught, athletic Elmiraj coupe. The latter of these showcased designed cues that trickled into production Cadillacs. No word (or pictures) on the exterior yet. We'll be sure to have complete coverage of the concept later this week. Related Video: Image Credit: Cadillac Cadillac Concept Cars Videos Pebble Beach

Cadillac and Buick boost GM's return to growth in China

BEIJING — General Motors on Monday said continued market recovery from the COVID-19 crisis helped its China vehicle sales grow 12% on year in July-September, marking the Detroit automaker's first Chinese quarterly sales growth in two years. The second-biggest foreign automaker in China by units — after Germany's Volkswagen AG — said on Monday it had delivered 771,400 vehicles in China in the third quarter. That followed a 5% fall in the second quarter, when parts of China were still emerging from virus-busting lockdown measures. GM has a Shanghai-based joint venture with SAIC making Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac vehicles. It has another venture, SGMW, with SAIC and Guangxi Automobile Group, producing no-frills minivans and which has started manufacturing higher-end cars. Sales rose 26% for cars under its mass-market Buick brand in the third quarter versus the same period a year earlier, while those of premium brand Cadillac jumped 28%, GM said in a statement. Sales of its mass-market Chevrolet marque fell 20%. Sales of no-frills brand Wuling grew 26%, whereas those of mass-market Baojun vehicles tumbled 19%. "GM's compact models returned to four-cylinder engines and that helped sales growth," said LMC Automotive senior analyst Alan Kang, referring to an attempt to market cleaner but noisier three-cylinder versions. "Cadillac also has a more complete lineup this year." China's biggest automakers' association expects overall car sales to grow by double digits in July-September versus a year earlier. Makers such as Toyota, Honda and Geely saw sales jump in the just-finished quarter. GM has seen its China sales suffer in a crowded market and slowing economy. To revive its fortunes, it plans to have electric vehicles (EVs) make up over 40% of new models in the next five years in China, where the government promotes greener cars. The automaker's Wuling Hong Guang MINI EV, a micro two-door EV with a starting price of 28,800 yuan ($4,200), was China's biggest-selling EV in August. GM's sales fell 15% in 2019 from a year earlier to 3.09 million vehicles. The automaker delivered 3.65 million vehicles in 2018 and 4.04 million in 2017. Related Video:

Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.