The , the most popular hybrid in the world, was also the most popular plug-in vehicle in U.S. last month.
Compared to sales of the and the , which , respectively, the quietly sold 1,654 copies in April, reports PluginCars. With such strong name recognition and pent-up demand for a Prius with a cord, this shouldn’t really have been a surprise. But it still kind of is.
sold more Prius models in the U.S. last month than ever before in April (March 2012 was ), even though . The four members of the “Prius family” sold a combined 25,168 units, an increase of 126.9 percent compared to April 2011 (which was right after the Japanese tsunami). Overall, Toyota and sold 32,593 hybrids last month, 30,126 of them wearing the Toyota badge, 2,467 of them the upper-class Lexus models.
Last year, Toyota said it . Since Toyota doesn’t break out model numbers, we’re not sure what the total is for the year thus far, but 1,654 plug-ins a month is enough for the company hit that target. Scroll down for Toyota’s official sales results.
The folks over at Saabs United have been a fixture on the Swedish automobile scene for some time now, cementing themselves as the hub for all manner of news and gossip as the fight to keep the brand alive has ebbed and flowed over the past couple of years. So significant was SU’s bond with the automaker that its principle, Steven Wade, had the ear of buyer Victor Muller throughout the General Motors extrication process, and eventually Wade , leaving others to run the website.
With Saab having slipped into bankruptcy and the company’s Trollhättan plant idled, Saabs United now finds itself at the center of a new fight – an effort to preserve the final – possibly the final Saab ever. An Arctic White Griffin sedan, the 9-3 exists in a state of partial build but is scheduled for final assembly at the end of this month. The car is part of a special batch of about 50 partially finished cars and a cache of spares that Trollhättan dealership group ANA , and it will be for sale. Saabs United has taken it upon itself to rally the faithful in an attempt to purchase the car for donation to the Saab Cars Museum, which was itself .
It seems only fitting that the 9-3 Griffin would join other final examples of various models in Saab’s history at the Museum, but even then, the car’s fate might not be entirely secure. According to SU, “A number of cars at the museum from the history of Saab that was written in the last two years are NOT secured. They are either borrowed to the museum or are still missing.”
As of this writing, the funding effort is well on its way, with Saabs United faithful and various clubs and investors having raised over 15,000 Euros (around $19,750 USD), with a goal of 28,500 Euros ($37,500) within the next 18 days. If the total amount needed is not reached, fundraiser proceeds will still go to the Saab museum, and if extra money is raised, it’ll be donated, too. If you’re interested in learning more or making a donation, .
From show floor to evacuation route, one concept vehicle got the chance to test it’s meddle in the real world.
The Super Duty Rescue Truck was created to demonstrate extreme rescue capabilities not actually use them. It first went on display in February at the .
But on April 3, with just two miles on its odometer, this concept vehicle found itself in the thick of a real-life rescue mission. A series of devastating tornadoes had ripped through Arlington, Texas, overwhelming every fire-rescue department in the region. Destruction was everywhere.
Worse yet, many of the neighborhood streets were filled with debris ranging from roofs to cars and the big fire trucks couldn’t maneuver through them.
That’s when Brad Snyder, vice president of marketing at in Grandbury, Texas, got a call the Arlington emergency services director for help. The director knew the local volunteer fire department had advised Snyder on building an extreme rescue vehicle for and now the city needed its help.
“When we proposed the truck to Ford, one of the things Ford required was that everything on the truck actually work,” Snyder said Tuesday. That’s not always the case with concept vehicles, which often could not even qualify to ride on a U.S. highway.
“We never intended to put it into service,” Snyder said. But put it to work they did. Keep on reading to find out how.
sales are up 10 percent already this year, after ending 2011 on a 20-percent uptick. With its Alabama assembly plant , something had to change. In response, the Korean automaker will be adding 877 jobs at its Montgomery assembly plant to begin a third shift, starting in September 2012.
Hyundai said the plant is now responsible for creating over 3,000 total jobs, with the latest expansion adding some 20,000 units of annual capacity. Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama builds both the and sedans.
While this move will work as a short-term solution to Hyundai’s capacity restraints, if the company continues to grow sales as it has in the past few years, it will soon be faced with the necessity of building another new production facility, for months.
The sales figures you see below aren’t quite what they seem. If you look at just the left column where the battle between green and red cells is almost at a draw, you might think that April 2012 was a step backwards in terms of sales momentum for the auto industry. That column, however, is practically irrelevant this month.
Shift your head a little to the right and read the DSR (Daily Sales Rate) column. That’s the important column this month. People usually ignore this column because they don’t understand its purpose or because its data looks so similar to the left column, but this month it means everything.
Why? Because there were 24 selling days for the auto industry last month, versus 27 selling days in April 2011. Usually there’s only a single-day variance between months or no variance at all, but three selling days is a chasm to overcome and means that if you’re only comparing raw numbers like the left column does, the entire industry was at a three-day disadvantage last month compared to the same month one year ago.
The DSR column, on the other hand, shows the change in average number of vehicles sold per day during April of this year and last. This is the more accurate representation of how each automaker performed in April, and as you can see, nearly all continued their momentum of increased sales with the usual suspects occupying those bottom red cells.
Check out how the entire auto industry did in the monthly sales chart below, and visit our By the Numbers section to see all past months.
*Brands and companies are displayed in descending order according to their percentage change in volume sales. There were 24 selling days in April 2012 versus 27 selling days in April 2011, so there will be a difference between monthly sales volume and the average daily sales rate (DSR) for each brand/company. Also, brands are combined and reported as companies only if their sales figures are released jointly.
sales are up 37 percent through April, and has already sold nearly 50,000 units in 2012, placing the flagship model ahead of all other Pentastar vehicles, save for the .
That demand will be keeping the Jefferson North assembly plant in Detroit open through the July 4 holiday period, according to The Detroit News. Big Three plants have traditionally shut down for two weeks in July to facilitate model-year changeover, though that process will be accomplished with the lines running this year, according to the report.
Jefferson North is already running overtime including some Saturdays to keep up with demand for both the Grand Cherokee and the . Sales of the model are up seven percent this year.
From the headlines-we-never-expected-to-see file: “Stick shifts popular again…” Yes, we thought , what with every carmaker bemoaning low take rates and reports that has decided to in both its sports car and throughout the range of models. But lo and behold, it seems that manuals accounted for 6.5 percent of new vehicle sales during the first quarter this year, the highest take rate since 2006, according to Edmunds.com numbers cited by USA Today.
This surge in popularity comes despite a 10-percent drop in the percentage of new models offering stick shifts in the past five years, according to the report. The change in consumer behavior has surprised some automakers, including , who told the newspaper that demand for a manual in the is nearly 10 percent, more than double the automaker’s original forecast.
Of course before we get too excited – or give credit to the Car and Driver – let’s keep in mind that a decade ago, when we first started to hear the groundswell against the manual from automakers, the take rate for manuals was still running above 8 percent. And we’re still faced with an inevitable demographic shift as Millennials, born after automatic transmissions became dominant, grow up. The best we can hope for is to teach those willing to learn and hope to keep the manual tranny around as long as possible.
We keep track of every idea that for . Of the hundreds we get after each episode airs, one is without question at the top of everyone’s list: drive 200 miles per hour.
Despite the first production car eclipsing 200 mph back in the mid-’80s, we thankfully aren’t yet jaded by the feat. Unlike back then, however, more than a handful of today’s cars can beat two bills if given enough runway.
That’s exactly where Jessi and Patrick found themselves on the day we asked them to do the deed: the runways of the near Mojave, CA. Eagle-eyed Autoblog readers will remember that this is one of the locations used by to conduct their . We should know; we’ve gone after the elusive two hundred twice now, but at this very location (check out the gallery from that experience below).
We enrolled Jessi and Patrick for a day’s worth of double-hundy attempts in vehicles like the and new . Each took their own shot at 200-mph glory, and one even discovered that reaching 200 mph is the easy part.
may seek to reposition in the wake of slower sales, according to Automotive News. It’s been 10 years since the Japanese automaker unveiled its youth-oriented brand, and Toyota recognizes that the original target demographic has officially grown up. After concluding a nine-month review of the Scion brand, the parent company has decided to move away from quirkiness and toward more mainstream creations.
Models like the and serve more traditional buyers than the nameplate’s best-selling , though Jack Hollis, Scion vice president, says the future of the boxy five-door remains uncertain. While speaking with Autmotive News, Hollis said the company may not replace the model with a “one-for-one” interpretation of the box as buyers are less and less interested in funky exterior designs.
Scion suffered dearly during the sales downturn of 2008 and 2009. By 2011, the company’s numbers had fallen to within 25 percent of its 2006 volume. With consumer credit tightening by the day, recent college graduates have reportedly found it difficult to finance a brand-new Scion. Hollis says sales are on the mend, and the company is cautiously optimistic. In the meantime, expect to see Scion show off more mainstream marketing aimed at a wider consumer audience.
Sponsoring most events is pretty straightforward for any company: fork over the right sum of cash and you’re the new official automaker/timekeeper/jelly donut of whatever the event is. But for , its status as Official Automotive Partner of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a bit more complicated.
Even to fork over a massive fleet with 4,000 vehicles to the organizing committee wasn’t enough for the German automaker to secure its status. BMW also had to meet the committee’s stringent emissions requirements: while the average emissions of vehicles in the UK comes in at 138 grams of CO2 per kilometer, the automaker supplying these Olympic games had to come in below 120 g/km – which BMW did at 116 g/km.
To get there, a portion of the cars BMW is supplying are electric vehicles: 160 units of the and 40 of the Mini E, with another 40 of the . The rest of the fleet is comprised of the (1,550 vehicles), (700), (17), (10) and (200 vehicles), plus another 25 R1200 RT motorcycles and 400 BMW Streetcruiser bicycles.
Wondering what they’ll be doing with all those cars? They’ll be used for everything from shuttling around the athletes, officials, medics and journalists to hauling boats out of the water. for the full details.
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. A stolen from celebrity chef Guy Fieri has been found a year after it first went missing. In case you need refreshing, the Lambo was pilfered by a thief who literally in order to get access to the Italian Stallion.
It seems the perpetrator had a thing for stealthy operations – the vehicle turned up during an investigation that began after a motorcyclist wearing all black fired a gun into a parked car. The gunman was a 17-year-old boy, and Fieri’s car was located in a storage container in Point Richmond, California, along with the boy’s motorcycle and apparent evidence linking him to the shooting.
Fieri, for his part, is happy to have his Lamborghini back:
“I would like to thank the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and the Mill Valley Police Department for their hard work and effort in the recovery of my car. I’m glad we can put this behind us, and feel better knowing that justice is being served.”
If absence truly does make the heart grow fonder, we’d be happy to have our back in one piece, too, especially considering it’s been over a year since its disappearance.
There could not be a more bland teaser for the upcoming all-electric “all new” EV than the one just released: silver sheetmetal with a badge that simply reads “Electric.” To see the rest of the vehicle, we will have to wait until the Electric Vehicle Symposium () gets started in Los Angeles next week. Luckily, we will be in LA with a camera or two and will bring you the full details from the show Monday, May 7. For now, all we know is what we’ve learned about the prototype that Toyota and have been showing for a while. For example, it will likely . .
Speaking of EVS, what’s kind of surprising is that this year is the 26th edition of the show. Yes, even as we’re just seeing the dawn of the modern EV era, some groups have been working on these vehicles for decades. It’s a long road to get off of gasoline.
Automotive News reports plans to bring its recently unveiled Mirage to the Canadian market, and that the five-door hatch has a 50-percent chance of making it to U.S. buyers as well. Mitsubishi pulled the Mirage nameplate from the U.S. in 2002, but unveiled of the car in Thailand just last month. At a smidge over 146 inches long, the tiny hatch would be a suitable competitor for the likes of the Chevrolet Spark and give dealers a much-needed product infusion. The company the , Eclipse Spyder and the just recently and Mitsubishi showrooms are starting to look decidedly emaciated.
But Mitsubishi says it may not be as simple as dropping the new Mirage on U.S. soil and hoping for the best. The automaker has a reworked coming down the pike, and launching two models in close succession may make already scarce marketing dollars even harder to come by.
Then there’s the fact that the new Mirage is a no-nonsense, bare-bones creation designed to appeal to the budget-minded buyers of South Asia. Mitsubishi has some reservations about unleashing the model on content-hungry Americans. Even so, Mitsubishi says the company has yet to reach an official decision about a U.S. launch.
It takes a lot to stand apart at an exposition as jam-packed with glitzy treasure as the and impress the hordes of automotive journalists there assembled, but we were suitably impressed when we laid eyes upon the at the Messe this past September. The Croatian upstart put together a supercar of (figurative, if not literal) proportions, but instead of building it around a fossil-guzzling conventional powerplant, Rimac designed its hypercar with the equivalent of 1,088-horsepower worth of electric motors.
With a 92kW battery powering the electric motors at each wheel, the Rimac is said to be capable of rocketing to 62 from a standstill in just 2.8 seconds while traveling as far as 372 miles on a single charge. The team of former Pininfarina designers penned an attractive shape to go with it, the Bulgarian leathercrafters extraordinaires at Vilner were brought in to craft the interior, HRE developed a unique set of monoblock alloys and Vredestein debuted its new Ultrac Vorti tires designed by Giugiaro all for the Concept_One.
Impressive specs, all, but what’s most impressive is that the Concept_One is no mere concept – you can actually buy it, assuming you’ve got the scratch. Upon showcasing the electric supercar at Top Marques in Monaco, Rimac announced a limited run of 88 examples will be built, each fetching $980,000 – a price as princely as the regent who was on hand to check it out in Monte Carlo. Which only goes to prove that you can, indeed, have your cake and eat it too, but it’ll cost you dearly.
Take a closer look at the fresh crop of high-resolution images added to the gallery above and check out the bonus video of the car moving under its own power by .
has managed an impressive turnaround since the dark days of 2009. After carpet-bombing the market with a spate of new or refreshed models, the automaker saw its retail sales jump a whopping 43 percent in 2011, helping it report in the process. Chrysler even managed to pay out profit-sharing checks for the first time . According to Richard Cox, director of the Dodge brand, that trend hasn’t slacked up in 2012. Year-to-date in the neighborhood of 40 percent.
But those gains were made largely by fluffing the pillows on old platforms. New engines, new interiors and reworked sheetmetal aside, we’ve yet to see what “the new Chrysler” can pull off with a completely fresh model. At least, that was the case.
Behold the : the first serious small-car effort from the automaker since the Neon rolled off into the sunset in 2005. As the first completely new machine from Chrysler since the automaker’s bankruptcy and subsequent takeover by , there’s plenty riding on the new compact.
While technically based on the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, American engineers have drawn and quartered the chassis while also reworking the suspension to suit domestic tastes. With eye-catching styling, an à la carte option system and a range of fuel-efficient and powerful engines, the 2013 Dart isn’t just a step forward for , it might just be a step forward for the compact class.
A had three goals for his first Nationwide Series race at Richmond International Raceway: to finish, to do it on the lead lap, and to do it . He achieved one of them, crossing the line in 22nd place – two laps down on winner Kurt Busch. His only real incident was getting busted for speeding in the pit lane, which dropped him further down the order.
Pastrana plans on and nine races in NASCAR’s lower-tier K&N Pro Series East. This one at Richmond will have been the hardest Nationwide event because it was the first, but having brought the car home at all will be a boost and should get him cleared by series officials to run the high-speed track at Charlotte on May 26.
This was Pastrana’s overdue intro to NASCAR after he broke his ankle at the X Games last year and had to abort his 2011 schedule. He pledged to stay off the bikes for two years to give stock car racing a real shot and said he wants to be in the top 20 this year, top ten next year, and fighting for wins the year after. As for that target he put on Danica Patrick’s back in Richmond, no doubt he got a good look at it since she finished a spot ahead of him in 21st. He’ll get another shot at the Nationwide race at Darlington on May 11th.
We knew the Morgan 3 Wheeler was coming to America, we just didn’t know when or how. The skinny, according to a report on Inside Line, is that the 3 Wheeler will be sold through three U.S. dealerships beginning later this year. One of those dealers will be Liberty, the Seattle company that got this whole thing started by – Morgan then bought Liberty and used it to develop the production model.
The other two locations haven’t been divulged, but one on each coast is the early betting line. We’ll probably know after Morgan scion Charles has finished running his 3 Wheeler in next month’s Gumball 3000 rally, and by then the company might have settled on an official U.S. price. Even if you do plan to make it yours, though, don’t expect on soon: Morgan only plans to make 500 per year, and that exact number was already pre-sold eight months ago.
Ex-engineer Richard Parry-Jones is now chairman-designate of the UK’s Network Rail. Having looked into the futures of both car and train development, he believes that by the end of this decade the most Earth-friendly internal-combustion engine cars will be about as polluting, on a per-passenger basis, as high-speed electric trains.
Parry-Jones says carmakers are targeting 40g/km of CO2 tailpipe emissions by 2020. If the “average” occupancy of 1.6 people-per-vehicle stays the same in eight years, that would equal 25 gm per person per kilometer and put such cars in the same environmental category as the cleanest mass transit.
Since the emissions of electric cars and trains is usually given as zero, we’re assuming he means diesel-electric high-speed trains; life-cycle emissions wouldn’t be a valid comparison since those aren’t factored into a car’s tailpipe number. According to of , right now you’d have to load four folks in a small diesel topped up with ultra-low sulphur fuel to get down to 42 grams per passenger per kilometer (gpkm), which would put you right with one of Virgin’s Voyager class diesel-electric trains at 75-percent capacity. If you want to go all the way low, though, you’ll need a 50cc two-stroke and a passenger: at that point you’re rocking just 19.5 gpkm. Slowly.
If you are still stuck driving a prematurely rusty 2004 Ford Freestar or Mercury Monterey minivan, you have our deepest sympathies. But for all your suffering, you might still gain some small measure of satisfaction from .
Remember launched by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year? Well, the good news is that NHTSA has upgraded the issue to a full-fledged engineering analysis, according to The Detroit News. Specifically, the Feds are trying to figure out whether there’s any difference between the 2004 models, vehicles that have engendered 22 reports concerning rust in the rear wheel wells, and 2005-2007 models, for which there are no registered complaints. (A 2006 model is pictured above.)
More than 82,000 vehicles are potentially affected by the rust problems, according to the report, with symptoms including difficulty latching the rear seats and anchor plates that have detached from the vehicle.
It’s almost DLC time again at – Tuesday, May 1 will bring with it the Top Gear pack, a true goulash of automobilia. At one end you have the 2012 Hennessey Venom GT, a car that automotive historians will look back on and say “Wow.” At the other end you have the 1977 AMC Pacer X, a car that we look back on and say “Wow.” In ‘between’ are the: 2011 SuperSportVan, 1965 Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII, , 1966 Lotus Cortina, 1992 Galant VR-4, , 1990 RS and .
The bad news is that the TG pack won’t be part of the Season Pass, so you’ll need 560 MS points, or $7, to make it yours. But if you throw down the fresh amounts you’ll be able to enter the new Community Rivals Mode with the Hennessey Venom GT. Set a leaderboard time with it and you could win one of the 100 unicorn cars Forza will be handing out every week.
to check out the video and have a look at the wares in the gallery of high-res screenshots.
The sales figures you see below aren’t quite what they seem. If you look at just the left column where the battle between 
