Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The Chevrolet Volt, shown here on the line at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant, and its Opel sibling the Ampera have been named Europe’s Car of the Year. Photo: General Motors

The Chevrolet Volt and its kissing cousin, the Opel Ampera, are Europe’s “Car of the Year,” beating compacts from Volkswagen and Ford to add another award to the car’s trophy shelf.

The award, announced today ahead of the Geneva auto show, came two days after General Motors said it will suspend production of the plug-in hybrid for five weeks because of slow sales.

Still, the fact that the car is selling slower than expected didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the 59 judges, from 23 European nations, who gave the Volt and Ampera top honors. The car is, frankly, an engineering marvel and a true technological step forward, points the judges made.

The judges called the Chevrolet Volt and Opel Ampera “a mature product” that is “better suited to consumers’ needs than the conventional electric car.” They predicted we’ll see more plug-in hybrids as “others will come along this path.”

The Opel Ampera, left, and Chevrolet Volt are essentially the same car. Photo: General Motors

General Motors and its European subsidiary, Opel, bested seven finalists, including the second-place Volkswagen Up and Ford Focus, selected from among 35 vehicles.

“This encourages us further to continue our leadership role in the area of e-mobility,” said Karl-Friedrich Stracke, CEO of Opel/Vauxhall.

The Volt is a fine car, one that neatly and impressively bridges internal combustion and electric mobility. If the car has a drawback, it is price — the model we tested cost $44,680 before the $7,500 federal tax credit.

That, of course, makes it a favorite target of critics who like to attack General Motors and the Volt as failed experiment subsidized by federal tax dollars. Such was the case Friday, when GM announced it will suspend Volt production at its factory in Hamtramck, Michigan for five weeks effective March 16. The closure is prompted by slow sales; GM dealers have some 3,600 Volts in inventory.

“Sales for the Volt in February were significantly better than January, and we anticipate that to continue,” said GM spokesman Chris Lee. “We see good things in the future, but right now we had to make this adjustment.”

GM sold 1,063 Volts last month, up from 603 in January, making it unlikely the company will meet its goal of selling 45,000 Volts in 2012.

This is the third time production has been stopped for a month or more since the Volt went on sale in December, 2010. The move will put 1,600 people out of work for the duration of the shutdown.

The Volt also has been named Motor Trend Car of the Year, Automobile Magazine Car of the Year and North American Car of the Year.

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up.

Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product… and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses.

But first, we’re told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem of course is that more noise is not better noise.

In Corey’s words, the conventional, broken wisdom is:

• Follow a ton of people to get people to follow back
• Focus on the # of followers, not the interests of followers or your relationship with them.
• Pump links through the social platform (take your pick, or do them all!)
• Offer nothing of value, and no context. This is a megaphone, not a telephone.
• Think you’re winning, because you’re playing video games (highest follower count wins!)

This looks like winning (the numbers are going up!), but it’s actually a double-edged form of losing. First, you’re polluting a powerful space, turning signals into noise and bringing down the level of discourse for everyone. And second, you’re wasting your time when you could be building a tribe instead, could be earning permission, could be creating a channel where your voice is actually welcomed.

Leadership (even idea leadership) scares many people, because it requires you to own your words, to do work that matters. The alternative is to be a junk dealer.

The game theory pushes us into one of two directions: either be better at pump and dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keep increasing), or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.

Only one of these strategies builds an asset of value.

Hybrids can save gas. They also can save lives.

Gas-electric vehicles tend to be more effective than their conventional counterparts when it comes to shielding occupants from injury, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute. On average, the your odds of being injured in a crash are 25 percent lower in a hybrid.

Why? Because hybrid vehicles weigh more. Although hybrids share the same dimensions as their gas-swilling sisters, the battery, motor and electronics provide greater mass. A Toyota Highlander Hybrid, for example, weighs 330 pounds more than the gasoline version. All things being equal, heavier cars fare better than lighter ones in a crash.

“Weight is a big factor,” Matt Moore, Institute v.p. and author of the report, said in a statement. “Hybrids on average are 10 percent heavier than their standard counterparts. This extra mass gives them an advantage in crashes that their conventional twins don’t have.”

There are other factors at play, including when, how and by whom hybrids are driven. The Institute included controls to minimize the impact of such variables. At the bottom line, the Institute says, the findings show consumers don’t have to trade safety for fuel efficiency.

The institute analyzed more than 25 hybrid models with conventional counterparts, all of them 2003 to 2011 models. The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight were not included because they are hybrid-specific models.

There is a downside, however. A separate analysis by the Institute found hybrids may be as much as 20 percent more likely to injure pedestrians. The problem is pedestrians don’t always hear the hybrids coming. It’s a common complaint, one the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is working to address.

Photo: General Motors

Google, enormously successful in online advertising, might be casting an envious eye toward the $150 billion-per-year pay television market. Such a venture has the potential to turn today’s business of television advertising and distribution upside down.

The company’s already announced plans to build a fiber-optic high-speed Internet service in Kansas City, Mo. and Kansas City, Kan., and according to The Wall Street Journal subscription required, now Google might be thinking about ways to expand that into pay video and telephone services.

That would put Google in direct competition with cable companies and phone companies that have expanded into what’s called the “triple play” of communications: cable television, telephone and high-speed Internet.

The Wall Street Journal said “no final decisions have been made,” but added Google has talked about including content owned by Disney, Time Warner and Discovery Communications. Further evidence would be the rumored hiring of cable TV executive Jeremy Stern, who is said to be leading those discussions with the media conglomerates.

This would put Google in a position where it could not only sell subscriptions to the pay TV channels, but sell ads on those channels as well. It would also put its video-on-demand services in a sweet spot, perhaps moving many of its video capabilities over to the streaming-video Internet side, rather than the conventional cable TV business model.

Google might even be able to turn YouTube into a sort of “virtual cable TV,” where customers could pick and choose the programs they want, and it might be available on a national, or even international scale.

And, as its Google TV continues its current expansion onto a variety of hardware platforms (including, perhaps something manufactured by Motorola Mobility, which Google now owns), the Android-based Google TV might make it easier for customers to search and sort through the tremendous numbers of programs that could be available on such a service.

Google’s negotiations with content creators could also give Google TV an advantage it has never enjoyed before, where the biggest weakness of the company’s potentially groundbreaking TV service was the lack of cooperation of content creators. If it puts itself on equal footing with the other pay TV providers, it might be in a better position to offer its Google TV service as a hub for video, no matter where it comes from.

Apple’s architects were just teasing us in June when they gave us a peek at the company’s new circular headquarters planned for Cupertino. Now, a group of idyllic renderings has surfaced, offering a more detailed look at what we call the AppleSaucer, officially called “Apple Campus 2.”

The 2.8 million-square-foot four-story workplace for 12,000 Apple employees will contain a 1,000-seat auditorium, 300,000 square feet of research facilities, a couple of levels of underground parking in the circular structure, as well as an external four-story parking structure. Best of all, it will run mostly off the grid, using its own “energy center” as its power source, using the conventional power grid as a backup.

The building will be enshrouded in huge pieces of curved glass. When originally presenting this to the City of Cupertino, Steve Jobs said, “We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use.” Perhaps those enormous new pieces of glass Apple’s installing at its Fifth Avenue store will be a warm-up for this grand finale.

Beyond the renderings in the gallery below, Macrumors points us to PDFs (Intro, site plan/landscaping, floor plans, renderings) you can download from Cupertino.org that reveal even more details.

Steve Jobs says the groundbreaking for this magnificent flying-saucer-like edifice is planned for next year, with completion scheduled for 2015. Will this 360-degree circular behemoth be the new 1 Infinite Loop?

Volvo takes safety very seriously, and if it’s going to start building cars with cords it wants consumers to know the technology is every bit as safe as a conventional car.

To that end, the Swedes rolled into the Detroit auto show with a Volvo C30 Electric that’s been bashed in a frontal collision test at 40 mph. We’ve shown you the video already, but it’s still interesting to see the pics and get a look at how the electric drivetrain fared.

“Our tests show it is vital to separate the batteries from the electric car’s crumple zones to make it as safe as a conventional car,” president and CEO Stefan Jacoby said in a statement. “In Detroit we are the first carmaker to show the world what a truly safe electric car looks like after a collision with high-speed impact.”

Volvo says the C30 Electric’s 24 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery was fully charged when the car was tested at its crash test lab early last month. The test in question is an off-set collision in which 40 percent of the front end hit a barrier at 40 mph. The battery and cables connecting the 400-volt system remained intact.

“The front deformed and distributed the crash energy as we expected,” Jan Ivarsson, senior manager of safety strategy and requirements, said in a statement. “Both the batteries and the cables that are part of the electric system remained entirely intact after the collision.”

The pack, which is good for a claimed range of 95 miles, weighs 660 pounds. It is mounted in the center tunnel where the fuel tank is found in the conventional C30. The battery is “robustly encapsulated,’ according to Volvo, and the body structure around the pack is reinforced. Putting the battery in the middle of the car provides optimal protection while centralizing mass.

The 82 kilowatt (110 horsepower) electric motor is under the bonnet where the engine would be. Ivarsson said that required reinforcing the front crumple zones because the motor occupies less space than the engine, which absorbs some of the energy in a collision.

Volvo says all of the cables are shielded for maximum protection. Crash sensors control the system’s fuses, and the same signal that deploys the airbags in a collision cuts power to the drivetrain in 50 milliseconds. Several other fuses cut power if the system detects a short circuit.

Volvo plans to roll out a demonstration fleet of 250 C30 Electric vehicles in Sweden early this year. Another fleet is slated to arrive in the United States later this year.

Photos: Volvo

When Gerald Roush died in late May, he left behind the Ferrari Market Letter. This newsletter, which he started and ran, had nearly 5,000 subscribers, paying him $130 a year for a subscription. Do the math! It’s a good living–even without a fancy website.

The newsletter, it appears, was not just lucrative, it was a bargain. It chronicled the pricing, whereabouts and details of just about every Ferrari ever made. If you were a buyer or a seller, you subscribed. If you wanted to run an ad, you were required to include the car’s VIN, which added to Roush’s voluminous database.

The Roush effect involves extraordinary domain knowledge, a market small enough to understand and diligently earning the role of data middleman. The players in the market want there to be one clearinghouse, one authority who can connect the data, see the trends and publish the conventional wisdom.

It might be a newsletter, a conference or an online database. The tactics don’t matter, but the role is indispensable. If you need examples to persuade you to try this, they won’t be hard to find. One of my favorites is my friend Michael’s role in the book industry. He’s bigger and more important than the famous (but failing) trade journal.

Just about every tribe needs a Gerald Roush. And in many markets, they can afford to pay someone like him very handsomely.