As you may know, one of the biggest automotive events in the civilized world, The Paris Motor Show, started this past Saturday. Right now, Paris is crawling with the top names in the automotive business, executives and designers and engineers and general enthusiasts. Also, automotive journalists. They’re all checking out the interesting new concepts and production vehicles being debuted. It’s a blast, I hear.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it since I had a special engagement with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Every year we watch the first Eagles/Redskins matchup of the season. The Lama’s a lifelong Redskins fan. So here I am, in a secret monastery deep in the mountains of Tibet, with my #12 Randall Cunningham jersey and a laptop. The views are beautiful here, but I’ll be honest, I would have liked to have seen the new Ferrari California in person. Still, if past experience has told me anything, it’s that you don’t turn down a personal invitation from the spiritual leader of any large number of people, exiled or no.

Nevertheless, I have my responsibilities as an automotive journalist to bring you the important news of the world, promptly and with unbiased objectivity. So here is a sampling of Jalopnik.com’s coverage of hot girls from Paris:

This piece done by 60 Minutes is a fairly good profile of the so-called race to build a commercially viable electric car between Detroit and Silicon Valley. It comes off a little out of touch, but the target audience is primarily my grandmother, so it works.

They make a good point that I think they might not realize they’re making: Detroit is a gigantic bureaucracy, they’re huge and it’s tough to turn a beast like that in different direction once it gets going. The smaller Silicon Valley start-up companies, on the other hand, can adapt and fit a niche market much more quickly. If you follow that reasoning out, you start to think… maybe the government shouldn’t be bailing out the Detroit Three, maybe we should just let the market decide without giving some companies an unfair advantage. Maybe by letting things run their course, a new, better company can come to power.

Check out the rest of the videos:

Yesterday, Toyota announced that they will begin offering 0% financing on 11 vehicle models, a maneuver simply unheard of throughout company history. Described by mouthpieces as a strategic marketing move intended to capitalize on Detroit’s credit crunch, Toyota hopes the 0% offer will help slow the bleeding their sales have been experiencing.

Prior to the announcement of the new incentive, Toyota appeared to be staying afloat in the tumultuous industry waters, thanks in no small part to its increasingly popular hybrid offering, the Toyota Prius. In September, however, the market apparently caught up, leaving Toyota with a record 32% drop in sales - a percentage that exceeded the industry average by a considerable margin.

The 2008 Paris Auto Show kicked off today amid highly publicized financial turmoil in the auto industry and rather than attempt to make the best of an admittedly dismal situation, many auto makers chose to take the Al Gore approach. Lest anyone think the future looks brighter illuminated by the news of government bailouts, GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson assured Paris Auto Show press that not only is the North American market weak, but the European market is likely to flounder in the next few months as well. Not to be outdone, Ford CEO Alan Mullay conservatively estimated that the global car market won’t even begin to recover until 2010. “2009 is not going to be better than 2008,” said Mullay, “We won’t see a recovery until 2010.”

Europe’s leading auto manufacturer, Volkswagen AG, isn’t nearly as fatalistic as the boys back home.

More bad news for Jaguar and Land Rover who were purchased from Ford by Indian automaker Tata Motors for $2.3 billion last march.  The already struggling British manufacturers have announced that they will cease production for a week at the end of October at their Halewood plant.  This comes after a number of other “black” days where production has slowed or stopped at other plants.

In the wake of the crushed $700 billion dollar emergency financial measure that sparked a historic plunge of the Dow Jones and caused many to wonder about the future of America’s economy, President Bush passed into law Tuesday a revised version of the legislative rescue, this time to the tune of $634 billion. Of that hefty sum, $25 billion has been guaranteed for use in keeping the Detroit 3 afloat in the form of low-cost government loans. Under the bill’s directive, 10% of that $25 billion will be specifically set aside for auto companies whose operating facilities are at least 20 years old as well as for those whose in-house family totals 500 employees or less.

As per the bill’s terms of agreement, the low-cost loans will carry an interest rate of about 5% and a 25-year payback timetable, as well as the option to request a five-year repayment deferment. Heralded by auto industry lobbyists as a much needed measure, the billion dollar bail out could stand to save Detroit’s Big Three more than $100 million per $1 billion borrowed.

What this means to you: Not a damn thing. Please proceed as you were, hording your life savings in your mattress, awaiting the impending financial apocalypse.

We wrote about the Tata motors air car and how it works a while ago. But now, another air car is getting some attention, the San Jose based Magnetic Air Car. The Magnetic Air Car supposedly uses the same compressed air technology as the Tata air car initially, but differs when it gets to the actual engine. Instead of a piston engine like the Tata has, the Magnetic Car is said to use three on-board air compressors to channel the air stream towards a magnetic motor.

I’m still a bit leery about the whole magnetic motor concept in general. I’ve seen too many “perpetual motion machines” that were powered by magnetic motors. There are very few specifics from the company website, but from my understanding, the magnetic motor works by harnessing the power of the magnets repelling each other.

Codenamed GMT168, the new Saab 9-4X is intended to kick off Saab’s highly anticipated aesthetic overhaul with its introduction in 2010. Until recently, photos of the 2010 Saab 9-4X were limited to heavily camouflaged spy shots, but Brenda Priddy and her team of espionage experts managed to score some stills of the new 9-4X showing some skin.

Check out the undressed 9-4X after jump

BMW X1 Spy Shot [Source: Motorbang.com]

Looking to generate some hype for the BMW Concept X1 that’s scheduled to premiere at the 2008 Paris Auto Show next week, BMW-web.tv uploaded video footage giving us a sneak peak of the new BMW Concept X1 that is strangely reminiscent of those 90’s-era slightly instructional videos I used to sit through in French class that always fell just short of identifying with the American teenage demographic.

At any rate, according to BMWblog, the BMW X1 will be available with either a rear- or front-wheel drivetrain, and its optional 4 or 6 cylinder engine offerings will be equipped to run on either diesel or standard fuel. Slated to make its first debut in the European market, the X1 is expected to be placed and priced somewhere between the BMW 3 Series Wagon and the BMW X3 - no word yet on how that would translate for a North American introduction.

Video after the jump

Ford believes the future of the automobile industry lies in the compact, crossover market and to prepare, they’ll be introducing two new vehicles to the Mercury line up in 2010. First on the list is a redesigned Mercury Milan sedan, which spy shots pictured above captured recently wearing heavy camouflage. Tentatively planned to be introduced in both standard and hybrid versions, the new 2010 Milan will be based on Ford’s already existing small car line up and sit on the redesigned FWD Ford Focus platform.