1994 Mitsubishi Mighty Max Base Standard Cab Pickup 2-door 2.4l on 2040-cars

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Nissan, Mitsubishi team up for $14,000 electric car

Last November, the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Mitsubishi announced a partnership to build some tiny electric vehicles for the Japanese market. Well, the partnership is going to build more than that (like the Nissan Dayz, pictured above in Roox form, and the Mitsubishi eK wagon), but we're most interested in the upcoming plug-in results. Those results are not here yet, but we now know that the 50-50 joint venture is moving forward and that the first "kei car" EV from the project is now due in fiscal 2016, according to the Nikkei Asia Review. The makers of the popular Leaf and i-MiEV electric vehicles say that the new small EV will be the cheapest EV on the market when its released, potentially priced at 1.5 million yen (around $14,700 US). Currently, the i-MiEV is the cheapest EV option in Japan, with a 2.5-million yen starting price (just under $24,500 US) before incentives. Taking a good $10,000 of the purchase price is likely more than enough to counter the smaller size and, perhaps, more limited amenities. Featured Gallery 2014 Nissan Dayz Roox: Tokyo 2013 View 15 Photos News Source: Nikkei Asia Review Green Mitsubishi Nissan Renault Electric kei car

Subprime financing on the rise in new car sales, leasing too

We all remember the financial crisis that began several years back. At its core was a splurge of subprime lending for housing loans. The housing bubble burst, triggering a collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market. Apparently, those types of loans still exist in the automotive industry, and the market share for these types of "nonprime, subprime, and deep subprime," loans has grown 13.6 percent compared to the third quarter a year ago.
According to an Automotive News report, high-risk lending expanded to 24.8 percent of total loans in Q3, up from 21.9 percent for this time last year. As this level increased, average credit scores of borrowers dropped to 755, down from 763 a year ago. In that time, the average financing amount increased $90 per vehicle, to $25,963.
At 818, Volvo maintains the highest per-owner credit score, while Mitsubishi has the lowest, at 694. The highest rate of borrowers was at Toyota, with 14 percent of the market, followed by Ford with 13.1 percent and Chevrolet at 11.1.

Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.