General Motors has blown the doors off analysts’ earnings expectations by announcing a 22 per cent rise in profits on the back of improved truck sales in the United States.

However, the American car maker has failed to stem losses in Europe, where it was knocked off course by its Russian business.

Losses before tax in Europe widened to $393 million in the fourth quarter, from $365 million a year earlier. Full-year pre-tax losses in the region went from $899 million in 2013 to $1.37 billion. While fourth-quarter sales in most of Europe were flat, in Russia they fell by more than a quarter.

Chuck Stevens, the company’s chief financial officer, said that the weaker rouble had made new vehicles more expensive for Russians. Last week, GM said that it would suspend production at its St Petersburg assembly plant for two months from mid-March and would raise its prices because of the weak currency.

Despite its problems in Russia, Mr Stevens told analysts that “the European business demonstrated improved core operating performance in the fourth quarter on a year-over-year basis”.

GM has pledged to return its European operations to pre-tax profit by next year and is withdrawing its Chevrolet brand across the Continent to concentrate on Opel and Vauxhall. Mary Barra,GM’s chief executive, said that the group’s focus on its Vauxhall and Opel brands in western Europe had dramatically improved prospects in the region.

GM’s net income reached $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $900 million a year earlier, partly driven by increased sales of full-sized SUVs and pick-up trucks, which have a wider profit margin than smaller cars. Revenue in the three months was $39.6 billion, against $40.5 billion a year earlier.

Full-year net income fell from $3.8 billion to $2.8 billion as costs associated with the recall of a record 30.4 million cars and trucks over faulty ignition switches came to $4.1 billion.

GM plans to raise its dividend by 20 per cent to 36 cents. It will pay record annual bonuses of up to $9,000 to its United States-based United Auto Workers union employees, up from $7,500 a year ago.

Shares in GM were $1.96 up at $35.96 in afternoon trading yesterday.

The world’s biggest carmaker is set to become its most profitable.

Toyota Motor Corporation said yesterday that, despite a marginal reining in of expected sales in the year to the end of next month of nine million vehicles, it was aiming for operating profits of 2.7 trillion yen (£15.1 billion).

Toyota, which has led the world in producing petrol-electric hybrid cars and last year started sales of the first mainstream commercially available hydrogen car, said that it had benefited from the weaker yen and stronger-than-expected American sales.

Reporting a 14 per cent rise in operating profits in the first nine months of its financial year after the close of the October-December quarter, it said that it expected full-year operating profits to come in 8 per cent better than last year’s Y2.5 billion. If that happens, the Japanese giant could beat Volkswagen, of Germany, to become the world’s most profitable carmaker.

Although volumes were down by 7 per cent in its home market, sales were up by more than 7 per cent in its largest marketplace, the United States. In Europe, where it makes Auris hybrids in Derbyshire, total sales in the nine months came in at 633,578, only 3,000 better than in the previous year.

In recent years Toyota in Europe has been concentrating on selling higher-margin hybrid vehicles, especially from its upmarket Lexus range.

The company said that operating income in Europe leapt by Y23.3 billion to Y66.4 billion.

It may be Britain’s bestselling car brand and has been since Harold Wilson was in Downing Street, but Ford still managed to lose more than $1 billion in Europe last year.

The picture was arguably worse elsewhere for the US auto group, with South American losses also helping to more than halve the company’s after-tax profits to $3.1 billion on sales marginally down at $144 billion.

Although one in seven cars sold in the UK is a Ford, the European recession has not been kind to the group. With sales in Russia collapsing, Ford in Europe lost $443 million in the last quarter of 2014, taking it to $1.06 billion in the red for the year.

One of the few upsides is that it is better than the $1.4 billion lost in Europe in 2013 and that operating margins are improving. Sales in the year were also 70,000 units better, at 1.38 million, and Ford launched the popular US model, the Mustang, in the UK this month.

Ford and its US rival General Motors have had a wretched few years in Europe compared with Volkswagen, BMW and Jaguar Land Rover.

One of the few improving units was Ford’s Transit van operation, which is now in eastern Europe.

The number of people owning their own car is likely to drop over the next 50 years because of growing anger over the state of Britain’s traffic-clogged roads, research suggests.

A rising number of adults — principally in the inner cities — will shun car ownership in favour of club-style rental deals and greater use of taxis, the Independent Transport Commission suggests. The think-tank adds that the number of miles driven by each car may fall dramatically as people seek alternative modes of transport.

Figures showed that on average men in their 20s travelled only 4,500 miles by car ten years ago, down from about 6,400 a decade previously. Trends seen among young people in recent years are predicted to cause a “ripple effect through the generations” as a rising number of adults become less dependent on the car in later life.

The study will fuel the “peak car” theory that Britain and other western nations are nearing a natural limit on the number of private vehicles that can be accommodated on the road network.

The Department for Transport forecasts that traffic on all roads will rise by 41 per cent between 2010 and 2040, including an increase of more than a third on small local networks. However, the commission said that the forecasts “may prove to be overestimates” because of the “deterrent effect of worsening traffic conditions”.

“As car use becomes less practicable for day-to-day journeys and/or less necessary, the utility derived from owning a car is reduced,” the study said. “Put another way, the perceived cost of owning and maintaining a car simply for occasional journeys is higher.”

The study, Traffic and Towns: The Next 50 Years, said that “utilising cars from a variety of sources” was likely to become a more common practice, particularly with the help of smartphone apps.

“These sources include obtaining lifts or car-sharing among families or friends, hiring taxis or minicabs, car clubs for short-term hire and conventional hire for longer journeys,” said the report, written by Peter Headicar, former reader in transport at Oxford Brookes University. “In this situation the cost and suitability of options are evaluated on a journey-by-journey basis (rather than car use being viewed as the default mode by car owners).”

The RAC Foundation rejected the findings, saying that repeated warnings over the death of the car had not been realised.

After a passionate affair lasting the length of the 20th century, the signs are that in the 21st the British are falling out of love with the motor car. While levels of private car ownership have not fallen yet, the number of miles driven in each car has been in decline for years. Once a symbol of freedom, the appeal of your own set of wheels has been seriously reduced by congestion.

A persuasive new study by the Independent Transport Commission (ITC) suggests decreased usage will soon become decreased ownership. What planners call “peak car” –— the point at which a road network becomes effectively full up and the disincentives to owning a car outweigh the convenience — may well be about to arrive.

For many people, notably those living in big cities, a number set to increase, peak car has already arrived. Urban driving long ago became the opposite of taking to the open road. Policies to lower car usage in cities, pedestrianisation, traffic-calming, investment in public transport, bus lanes, bicycle lanes, have found favour with urbanites. Short-term car hire is a growth industry. Cycling is enjoying an extraordinary and welcome revival. New technology in the form of GPS and phone apps has made travelling by bus or taxi efficient and predictable. Teleworking has reduced the number of commuters.

As the ITC says, these trends will surely continue. Among the young, passing your test and owning your first car are no longer the rites of passage they once were for previous generations.

In 1996, 80 per cent of men aged 21-29 held a driving licence. By 2009, that figure had dropped to 67 per cent. Yet current government transport planning remains stubbornly based on a forecast of a 41 per cent increase in car traffic over the next 25 years. If ever a prediction needed a rethink, this one is surely it.

A turf war is looming over driverless taxis after it emerged that Google and Uber are developing competing technologies.

Uber is to challenge Google’s supremacy in driverless cars by setting up its own testing facility with Carnegie Mellon University, which houses the world’s largest robotics research organisation. Meanwhile, Google is reported to be developing a taxi-booking service to rival Uber’s.

Uber is to focus its research on vehicle safety, autonomous driving and mapping. Travis Kalanick, its chief executive, angered drivers using the company’s platform by suggesting that they would soon become obsolete.

Jeff Holden, its chief product officer, said that the research project presented a “unique opportunity” to invest in technologies that could “enable the safe and efficient movement of people and things at giant scale”.

The fates of Google and Uber are intertwined. Google has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Uber and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, sits on Uber’s board. Uber, meanwhile, uses Google Maps to power its smartphone app.

A report by Bloomberg suggested that Google was developing its own ride-sharing app to use in its driverless cars. Uber executives had been shown screenshots of the app in use by Google employees, the report said.

Silicon Valley companies often develop in-house systems before releasing them to the wider world, as Facebook did with its new Facebook at Work system.

Google declined to comment, but a tweet posted by the company appeared to indicate that it had no immediate plans to compete with existing ride-sharing services. “We think you’ll find Uber and Lyft [a competitor to Uber] work quite well,” the tweet said. “We use them all the time.”

Insiders at Google also played down the importance of the ride-sharing app. One said that it had been created by an engineer to help employees share cars on their way to work, and had nothing to do with Google’s driverless car programme.

Mr Kalanick said last May: “The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car. When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper. Even on a road trip.”

He said that such a scenario was “quite a way off . . . but if I were talking to one of the drivers we partner with, I’d say, look: this is the way the world is going to go and if Uber didn’t go that way, it won’t exist”.

There was a 4 per cent increase in the number of deaths and serious injuries in the past 12 months, reaching almost 25,000, amid claims that technological “distractions” are causing motorists to lose concentration.

The data suggested that accidents were now on the rise after a long-term decline in injury rates over the previous three decades.

Incidents involving cyclists showed the biggest rise, with a record 3,500 deaths or serious injuries in the 12 months to last September, up by 8 per cent. Major accidents among children increased by 3 per cent to more than 2,000, representing the first year-on-year rise since the mid-1990s.

Officials suggested that the increase was driven by a rise in the number of cars taking to the road over the past 12 months.

The disclosure prompted claims that the government had become complacent about its road safety record, with cuts in funding for awareness campaigns.

The RAC said that many motorists were becoming distracted by the sheer number of gadgets installed on the dashboard of newly built cars. This included technology allowing motorists to connect smartphones directly to sound systems to make calls, play music and get directions.

Its own polling has shown that mobile phones are a “major source of distraction” for more than a quarter of drivers, rising to four in ten among those in their late teens and early twenties.

Pete Williams, the RAC’s head of external affairs, said: “Is it the case that many of us don’t link reaching for the phone with staying safe, and think we’re likely to get away with it?”

Julie Townsend, deputy chief executive of Brake, the road safety charity, said: “These casualty increases . . . come on the back of three years of flat-lining road death and serious injury figures, during which the government congratulated itself on having some of the safest roads in the world, rather than making forward thinking decisions.”

In all, 1,730 fatalities were recorded in the 12 months to September, a figure 1 per cent higher than the same period a year earlier. Some 24,360 people were killed and seriously injured and there were 192,910 casualties of all types, a 5 per cent increase. It was only the third time in 30 years that the number of accidents had increased after a downward trend in the number of deaths and injuries.

Robert Goodwill, the transport minister, said: “We are determined to do more to reduce these figures, working with the police and other agencies.”

The Institute of Economic Affairs says this idea would save money and end ‘sardine-like’ conditions for commuters.

Sir, The brave suggestion by the Institute for Economic Affairs that it might be time for much of Britain’s main rail network to be replaced by a road-borne coach network (report, Feb 3) will, of course, draw intense fire from the ubiquitous rail lobby.

I felt the full force of this brigade’s firepower in 2003 when, as a keen, newly appointed rail minister, I volunteered publicly my belief that part of the problem with this country’s transport policy was that it was profoundly influenced by trainspotters.

As the sky darkened with incoming missiles, the officials at the ministry were very kind to me, as an indulgent uncle might be kind to a deranged nephew, before they resumed their full-time job of trying to persuade the Treasury to cough up vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to keep the railways running. I fear that their job description has not changed much since then.

Dr Kim Howells
Pontypridd

Sir, The suggestion by the Institute of Economic Affairs concerning conversion of our railway to bus lanes is not new. It was floated in the 1980s by Sir Alfred Sherman, who was associated with the same organisation.

There were many loopholes in the proposal. For example, railway tracks are often narrow, have tunnels and bridges, as well as very elaborate and expensive safety systems (which largely work). Furthermore, there is the issue about all the coaches arriving at a major terminal and how they are dispersed.

The present problems of the railway are caused by rapidly increasing traffic and decades of underinvestment. The complex nature of the organisation, riddled with expensive lawyers and financiers as a result of privatisation, is why it costs so much to rectify.

Lord Bradshaw
Lib Dem transport spokesman in the House of Lords and former general manager, British Rail Western Region

Sir, About 30 years ago a study was made of the feasibility of converting the railway between the Chilterns and London into a busway. The idea was not proceeded with for various reasons, not least of which was the problem of what to do with a large number of buses at the end of the journey; clearly disgorging them on to London’s crowded streets was not acceptable.

The Cambridge to St Ives busway does a good job, making use of a former railway track bed, but is not carrying anywhere near the sort of volumes of passengers which the Institute for Economic Affairs mentions. As a retired former busman I am well aware of the potential of busways, but moving large volumes of passengers on urban and interurban corridors is best left to railways, which manage it very well for most of the time.

David Wallace
Wiveliscombe, Somerset

Sir, John Chapman (letter, Feb 5) says that buses could be linked and then put back on railway tracks. With no linkage and steered by the drivers, express coaches using one lane of a road could offer 75,000 seats an hour. That’s 50 per cent more than the crushed peak-hour railway commuters who arrive at Waterloo in trains requiring four inbound tracks.

The coaches would motor at 60mph, with the journey time from Southampton, for example, similar to that by rail. Fares, though, could be halved or perhaps even quartered. Linking the vehicles electronically would vastly increase potential capacity, but putting them back on rails would cost a fortune and prevent any other vehicle from using the track.

The opportunity is overwhelming.

Paul Withrington
Director, Transport-Watch

Hang on, this idea of converting old railways to roads for express buses sounds eerily familiar…

Sir, As was pointed out on one of the previous occasions when the idea of converting railways to roads was mooted (Feb 3), in order to save on the enormous cost of drivers at one per vehicle, the buses could be joined together in batches of, say, ten or twelve and then, to add to operational efficiency, they could run on rails rather than having to be steered. The end result could be called a “railway”.

John Chapman

Hythe, Kent