June 2008 was a calamitous disaster for new-car sellers all the way, to tap a baseball term, around the horn.

Well maybe not at every base. Mid-size and crossover vehicles surprised auto executives and analysts alike, faring decently among a battlefield of gloom.

People Just Aren’t Buying

Autodata Corp., which monitors and reports on vehicle sales, noted that the month was one of the worst car-selling months in many years, with sales dropping 18.3% compared with the same month a year earlier.

Sales figures were shackled by a 28.4% decline in sales of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles – based of course on their poor fuel economy in this high-gas-price era. Read more

In this era of downsizing automobiles to improve fuel economy, not everyone is quite ready to squeeze themselves or their family into a Prius.

Mid-size sedans might not be able to compete directly with the hybrids and compact cars out there, but they can present good bang for your buck if you still need passenger and cargo space without the crappy gas mileage of sport utility vehicles.

Middle of the Road

The mid-size sedan is and has been a fixture on American roadways for quite some time. They often top lists of the nation’s best-selling automobiles. Read more

People tend to forget just how expensive it can be to own and operate an automotive vehicle. 

Gas prices aside, many other things can add up in a hurry.

Recently, Edmunds published an interesting report about which vehicles are the least expensive to own. 

The Results

They separated vehicles into several classes, from sedans to trucks, and applied a proprietary program to estimate a five-year cost of owning each new vehicle.

The Yaris
Unsurprisingly the Toyota Yaris topped two categories – sedans under $15,000, and coupes under $15,000. Read more