These Are The Top-Selling Vehicles Of 2015

The 2015 Ford Mustang: If it was cool enough for Steve McQueen, it’s cool enough for everybody. It’s the top-selling sports car in the U.S.

Are the best movies the ones with the longest lines? The best Broadway shows the ones that you can’t get a discounted ticket for? The best restaurants the ones where you can’t get a table on a Saturday night?

The truth is that “the best” is in the eye of the beholder, and varies from person to person and household to household. Frank Sinatra recorded a song called “Nothing but the Best,” in which Ol’ Blue Eyes suggests that a Lincoln is the best ride. With a few weeks of the year left, though, the best-selling cars in the U.S. in the 10 categories we’ve examined are pretty clear based on sales volumes through November.

What does this list tell us about the competitive state of the U.S. auto industry, the buying tastes of the car-buying public and the company that managed to have the No. 1 vehicle in five of the 10 categories?

General Motors GM -2.94% trades positions with Volkswagen and Toyota for global dominance of the auto industry, yet it has no entries in this list of top U.S. sellers. VW has no entries either.

One of the things I notice in looking at a list of top sellers is that while quality ratings from third-party judges like Consumer Reports and J.D. Power are very important to many buyers, the success of some brands and individual models in the face of dreadful quality ratings tells me that many buyers are more swayed by their love of a design, price and brand history (I have always bought Plymouths…now what am I going to do”, said a friend when that brand shuttered.

The top sellers in the U.S. include Asian, and American makes, and one German brand. Are you one to follow the crowds, or stake out your own counter-trend choice? Are you a mass-market brand buyer, or do you prefer a niche brand? Read on to see how your taste fits with the vehicles that won the popularity contest this year.

California Puts Brakes on Self-Driving Car Technology

Fully autonomous vehicles aren’t ready for prime time, as far as California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is concerned.

The agency published draft regulations on Wednesday for how manufacturers can move from testing self-driving car technologies to start making vehicles available to customers.

California, as the state with the most cars on the road, often ends up setting many of the standards for the auto industry. Silicon Valley is where much of the research into autonomous vehicles is taking place, while many automakers have their design shops in the Los Angeles area. For now the DMV isn’t allowing automated cars that don’t have a human driver, even though Google Inc. is building one that’s designed to work without a person behind the wheel.

“Given the potential risks associated with deployment of such a new technology, DMV believes that manufacturers need to obtain more experience in testing driverless vehicles on public roads prior to making this technology available to the general public,” the agency wrote.

Recent vehicle prototypes by Mountain View, California-based Google are designed to move at the push of a button, and have no steering wheels or pedals. Google plans to spin out its self-driving car division into its own company next year, and introduce services in Austin and San Francisco. The proposed DMV regulations may affect plans for San Francisco.

“Safety is our highest priority and primary motivator as we do this,” Johnny Luu, a spokesman for Google, said in a statement. “We’re gravely disappointed that California is already writing a ceiling on the potential for fully self-driving cars to help all of us who live here.”

Automated Features

For cars with self-driving features that also require a human driver, approved manufacturers will be issued a three-year permit and the vehicles can only be operated by the manufacturer or leased to the general public. Several automakers, including Tesla Motors Inc., already sell products that fit into this category.

A representative from Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manufacturers will need to submit monthly reports outlining the performance, safety and usage of their autonomous vehicles, the DMV said. They’ll also need to provide a written disclosure to operators of the cars outlining the data that they’ll be collecting. Drivers will also be responsible for any traffic violations.

“The worrying thing would be a rush to regulation preemptively,” Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car program, said at an event in November. “We’re really in very much the early days of the technology, and if we paint the box we’re going to be stuck in that forever.”

Hyundai’s Prius-Fighting Hybrid Uncovered In Spy Shots

In the 15 years since Toyota launched the Prius hybrid, no automaker has come close to its sales success worldwide. Hyundai plans to change all that with this car, named the Ioniq, shown here for the first time uncovered in spy shots.

With gas prices below $2 a gallon in parts of the United States, any new hybrid/electric sedan faces a tough audience. Sales of hybrids have shrunk this year even as the larger market boomed—and about 75 percent of the hybrids that did sell wore either a Toyota or Lexus badge. With the all-new Prius hitting dealers now, Toyota will be pushing the car toward new buyers and launching a series of variants to fill out the line.

All of which makes the Ioniq’s task that much harder—but unlike most automakers who’ve fiddled with hybrids as a hobby, Hyundai has followed Toyota’s playbook and committed to the task. The Ioniq will be its own model, not a subset of an existing sedan, riding an all-new chassis designed for hybrids and electric power. The sleek hatch shape mimics the Prius, Honda Insight and other models designed for maximum aerodynamic efficiency, and in these shots looks fairly handsome.



Hyundai has said it will build the Ioniq in three versions: all-electric, plug-in hybrid and regular gas-electric hybrid running lithium-ion batteries. Power for the non-electric versions will also come from a 1.6-liter four-cylinder. After official debuts this spring, it should start hitting dealers late in 2016, with prices right in line with those of the Prius.

When it launches, the Ioniq will be the first car from a major automaker available with three levels of electric power. So far, cars with a plug have proven far less popular than needed for automakers to meet environmental targets, let alone make back their investment in technology and manufacturing. With Toyota taking a challenging approach to design with the new Prius, the Ioniq will certainly get some interest from eco-friendly shoppers. Whether the rest of the world pays attention will likely depend less on the Ioniq’s merits and more on whether gasoline stays cheaper per gallon than milk.

Photos: Brian Williams for SpiedBilde, under license to Yahoo Autos.