Toyota has released teaser photographs and a video revealing brief glimpses of its upcoming FT-Bh concept car, which is due to go on show at next month’s Geneva motor show.

As the photo of its tail reveals, the compact hybrid looks as if it might offer suitable transport for Batman and Robin, with its vertical rear lamps formed into a pair of scalloped, bat-wing wiggles.

Batman would need to be prepared to downsize from his current Batmobile, given that the “B” in FT-Bh stand for B-segment. That’s the supermini sector currently occupied by the likes of Toyota’s Yaris. The full name expands as Future Toyota B-segment hybrid.

Toyota says its FT-Bh will weigh just 800kg – midway between the tiny Smart ForTwo and the only slightly less wee Toyota iQ.

Long before the first day of the Geneva Motor Show, manufacturers habitually begin jostling for attention by revealing what they’ll be revealing, so to speak. Here’s a selection of the Geneva 2012 announcements that have already been announced.

The Olympics will come a tad too early for sponsor BMW when the games begin this summer. The company is furnishing a fleet of cars and motorcycles, plus 400 pedal cycles, to provide transport for London 2012. But its most innovative new products – the i3 electric car and i8 plug-in hybrid – won’t quite be ready in time.

BMW is sponsoring 130 athletes aiming to compete this summer, all of whom hope to peak at just the right moment to win gold. But the company’s own lithe new stars aren’t yet fit to compete. The compact i3 is not due in showrooms until late 2013, while the sleeker i8 coupe won’t follow before 2014, and neither is far enough along in its development cycle to participate.

Half a decade ago, Kia lured German car designer Peter Schreyer away from the Volkswagen group, where he had delivered some outstandingly elegant and successful designs including the original Audi TT, first-generation A3 and mark-IV Golf.

Installed as global design chief at the Korean brand, Schreyer has since overseen a series of productions Kias which, while perhaps never quite as arresting as the TT, have been consistently attractive and interesting.

The latest Kia Rio small family car is a case in point. It looks sleek and low from the outside but feels airy and roomy inside, which is a neat trick to pull off.

But a great car needs depth as well as good looks, and I can’t help feeling that Kia needs to do some more poaching of key talent. Its headhunters definitely need to bring in some suspension expertise from somewhere, because I’ve yet to drive a modern Kia where ride quality wasn’t a weakness.

Ford’s upcoming B-Max is not just a small MPV with unusual doors, it’s also a rolling showcase for Ford’s growing expertise in the use of high-strength steel. And that expertise means that the B-Max’s innovative doors, giving uninterrupted wide-open access to a car’s interior, will become a feature of other Fords in the near future.

Darren Palmer, product development director at Ford of Europe, confirmed last week that the techniques used to make the B-Max are “scalable”, and can be applied to bodyshells much larger than the modestly proportioned B-Max.

“The B-Max uses a very high proportion of boron steel,” explained Palmer. Boron steel is very strong, but is a particularly difficult material to work with. While the sheet steel traditionally used to make car bodies can be formed into complex shapes under ordinary conditions, boron steel has to be hot-stamped at fierce temperatures of around 1,000°C. The steel then has to be cooled in a controlled way, shrinking as it cools. And then the resulting shaped, cooled and shrunk piece of high-strength steel is much more difficult to weld onto the rest of the car’s body.

All these drawbacks are worth overcoming, because a material that is stronger and stiffer than ordinary steel can be used more sparingly, cutting the overall weight of a car for a given level of crash safety. And a lighter body means better fuel economy, or better acceleration, or both.

Electric cars are already a practical option for journeys within a radius of 40 miles or so, but longer trips still require a degree of planning. I’m due to take charge of a Nissan Leaf for a couple of weeks in March, and I’m already wrestling with the combinatorial problem of which charging points might let me visit family members who live in awkwardly remote spots like north Norfolk.

As you can tell, I’m keen to get a full taste of Leaf ownership, headaches, range anxiety and all.

Citroen’s design manager, Andy Cowell, introduced the new DS5 at a small reception last night, organised via Twitter and held in the new London offices of the SMMT.

Cowell is a softly spoken Briton who has worked in Paris for 20 years. He’s very clearly proud of the work done on the three-car DS line-up, although he seemed a mite disappointed with the DS4 – it’s evidently not selling as well as hoped. Lined up alongside the striking DS5 and DS3 it looked a bit ordinary.

I asked if it had been hard to inject character into a mid-sized car, compared with smaller or more imperious packages. Cowell, of course, dismissed the very idea. “If anything I think we gave the DS4 too much character,” he said, adding that he loved the design so much he used it as transport for his wedding.