It’s finally time to vote for your choice of The Worst Automobiles Today. Find out how below.

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TTAC commentator David Holzman writes:

Sajeev,

I have a new (to me) ’08 Civic LX 1.8 liter, stick, bought with 35k on the clock. The previous owner was a woman who traded it for a RAV4 I think (I bought the car from a Toyota dealer). I’m guessing partly based on gender stereotypes that she wasn’t availing herself of the high revs to flog a lot of performance out of the car. (Read More…)

GM’s Opel will cease building cars at its German Opel plant. After 2016, no complete cars will roll off the lines at the 50 year old plant. Opel will keep a logistics hub in Bochum. The plant will continue making yet undefined components, Opel’s interim boss Thomas Sedran told German media today. (Read More…)

Cue up Rossini’s William Tell Overture, folks, ‘cause the Lone Raider RIDES AGAIN!!

I enjoyed Murilee’s Junkyard Find’s feature last week, on this very example of Mitsubishi/Chrysler joint venture off-roadness. One of the things it motivated me to do was to check out the model that’s been seen tooling around my Eastern Sierra hangout.

Initially, I assumed it was a Montero, due to the well-documented scarcity of the Dodge version. Finding it parked close to my coffee stop allowed for a closer inspection, which revealed what you see right here in this entry of Bodacious Beaters. (Read More…)

Toyota decided to postpone construction of a new plant in Tianjin, China, and is considering the delay of another new plant in Guangzhou, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun writes, quoting unidentified sources. This due to sluggish vehicle sales in the wake of anti-Japan protests over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute, Asahi Shimbun’s sources said. (Read More…)

After taking you on a World roundup last time, I thought this week we would go back home and explore the best-selling cars in our own backyard.

Boring? That’s OK. You can visit 170 additional countries and territories in my blog in the comfort of your own lounge. Simple really.

Back to the backyard.

And the stars of the month are the Ford F-Series (expected), Honda Civic (not expected) and Dodge Dart (or not).

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Wanxiang Group, China’s largest maker of auto parts won the auction for A123 Systems, Reuters says. The maker of batteries for electric cars was funded partly with U.S. government money, but went bankrupt nonetheless. (Read More…)

While I was photographing a burned-up ’61 Caddy hearse and buying a ’41 Plymouth Special Deluxe sedan at the Brain-Melting Colorado Junkyard last week, I stopped to admire some of the many Kaiser-Frazer products scattered around the many acres of old iron. You’ll need to drop everything and read Ate Up With Motor‘s excellent history of Kaiser-Frazer before continuing with today’s Junkyard Find, so go do that right now. (Read More…)

Whoa! The driver of the little Legends car had two ribs and his pelvis broken in this accident. But what can we learn from it?

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My pants still fit me from college.

Well, they are sweatpants after all.

They were given to me by a friend of mine who is known as a “Datsunaholic”. He keeps a few old cars. A few of those models have been written up by Paul Niedermeyer who now keeps a lot of houses along with his new web site. He invariably finds ‘keeper folk’ from all walks of life. But most of the people he finds are not car enthusiasts at all.

Why do they keep these cars then?  Are they perhaps hoarders? Do they suffer the afflictions of the wantless?

Or is this just another write-up inspired by Kevin Bacon?

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Before it was called the 323 and then the Protegé, the North American version of the Mazda Familia was known as the GLC, aka “Great Little Car.” The really early GLCs (for example, the 7000-mile 1976 model living beneath Mazda USA’s California HQ) shared a lot of chassis components with the first-gen RX-7s, but this ’84 that I spotted in a Denver self-service yard is a more modern front-wheel-drive econobox. (Read More…)

Suzuki’s death rattle continues unabated as the company’s American distribution arm will receive $100 million in financing, half of which is earmarked to purchase inventory from parent company Suzuki Motor Corp.

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Despite previous calls for his ouster, Fiat’s CEO Sergio Marchionne was elected for another year as president of the influential European auto trade group ACEA, Reuters reports. In July, Volkswagen demanded Marchionne’s head after he had accused Volkswagen of exploiting the European crisis to gain market share by offering aggressive discounts. (Read More…)

Your personal information is valuable.

When I liquidated vehicles for Capital One, we typically examined over 14,000 variables before lending out our money to a customer.

Any customer. A credit card. An automobile. A commercial loan. It didn’t matter. We needed to get to know the economics of you first.

All of the low rates and big profits were dependent on buying your personal information, and then crafting decision models and metrics to determine your personal risk.

Our success in auto finance generated low rates for our customers and low delinquencies for our investors. But they both could have been far lower.

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Despite being attacked in some circles as symbols of American decadance, the compact crossover is rapidly gaining in popularity. French business outlet La Tribune reports that sales of small crossovers are up 25 percent this year, with crossovers of all sizes now accounting for 10 percent of the car market.

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