1994 Ford Ranger Xlt Standard Cab Pickup 2-door 2.3l on 2040-cars

Auto blog

FL man fatally shot after urging driver not to do donuts in a Mustang

Bradley Holt (pictured), the older half-brother of University of South Florida freshman quarterback Quinton Flowers, was killed in a random act of violence last week.
The 24-year-old Holt was throwing a football around with local kids in Allapattah, a neighborhood in Miami, when a yellow Mustang showed up and started doing donuts in the street. Holt, worried about kids playing in front his apartment complex, walked over to the driver and asked him why he was "driving so crazy with so many kids out here?"
The driver left. Holt's sister said the driver came back "about 15 to 20 minutes later" and fired two shots at Holt. One of them hit Holt in the back of the head, killing him.

China takes lead as GM's No. 1 market

It's happened. General Motors' biggest vehicle market - at least in terms of new model sales - is China. According to TheDetroitBureau.com, GM and its various Chinese joint venture operations enjoyed a 10.6-percent sales increase in the first half of 2013, selling almost 1.6 million units in the market. That puts GM China about 200,000 units ahead of its US sales totals over the same period - this, despite indicators that the communist nation's economy is losing momentum.
TDB notes that like GM, rival Ford has also enjoyed a robust 2013 in China thus far, with its sales up a whopping 47 percent to 407,721 units sold - 75,254 of them in June alone. Between the two US automakers, passenger car sales for the first half of 2013 are up around 14 percent, well ahead of the rest of the industry's 10-percent growth estimates for the market. Some of the sales growth may come as a result of an overall anti-Japan sentiment in China, though the American brands have long outsold their Japanese counterparts in the country.
By The General's own predictions, China will only continue to grow in sales importance. The company has designs on selling over five million cars a year in the market before the end of the decade, a total that figures to dramatically widen the gap versus its US totals - even if America's auto market makes a full recovery to the the salad days of over 17-million units a year.

Ford profiles surprisingly affluent Focus ST buyers

It comes as no surprise when Ford says that 32-percent of Focus ST buyers are under 35, but we weren't expecting this: the average annual salary of Focus ST buyers is $127,000. Twenty-two percent of non-ST Focus buyers are under 35, while their average annual salary is $67,000.
We like the Focus ST because it has 252 horsepower, is genuinely fun to drive and offers great value for performance-minded car enthusiasts; facts that are not lost on customers, it seems. Ford says that the Focus ST has the highest percentage of conquest sales for a non-hybrid model it sells, and that the top-four trade-ins are from Honda, Chevrolet, Mazda and Toyota. Demand for the hot Focus is strongest in Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston and Orlando.
"[The Focus ST is] having this kind of halo effect for other vehicles we'd hoped for when we invested in the ST brand," says John Felice, vice president of US marketing, sales and service, because it's helping to boost sales of other Ford vehicles.