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New Honda Fit ousts Toyota Prius as Japan's top-selling car last month

The Toyota Camry may lose its title as the best-selling car in the US next year and the Honda Civic has already managed to outsell the Toyota Corolla to become the top-selling compact in the US, but it looks like the domination woes have just hit Toyota on its own turf. Bloomberg reports that the all-new Honda Fit carries the distinction of being the best-selling car in Japan for October - the Fit's first full month on sale - outselling the popular Toyota Prius and Toyota Aqua (our Toyota Prius C).
Unlike the Camry's 16-year reign on US car sales, Japan's race seems a little tighter with the Fit most recently topping the sales charts in May 2011. Since then, though, the two Toyota hybrids have been the top two cars in for sale in Japan. The US won't get the next-gen Fit until the third quarter of 2014, but this new hatchback should be another solid option for buyers in the increasingly popular subcompact segment.

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Acura 1.6 EL

Drivers from Mexico or Canada who take their cars across the border into the United States may drive them legally here for one year, after which they must drive back home or go through a registration process that ranges from arduous to impossible, depending on the state. As a result, quite a few Canadian- and Mexican-market cars end up marooned and un-registerable here, and I find some of them during my junkyard travels. Today, we've got a Canada-only Acura that showed up in a Northern California boneyard recently. I'm always looking for junkyard odometers with very high final readings (right now a 631k-mile Volvo 240 holds the record), and at first glance I though I had come across a Civic sedan with nearly 450,000 miles. Then I noticed the metric speedometer and realized that I was looking at a non-US-market car. 448,538 kilometers is 278,709 miles, by the way. A look at the build tag and emissions stickers showed that this car was built and sold in Canada. I'd found a second-generation Acura EL in a Colorado junkyard a few years back, so I knew that I'd just found a first-generation EL. Like its Acura Integra contemporary, the Acura EL was based on the Honda Civic. It replaced the Integra in Canada for 1997 and production continued through 2005. It differed somewhat in appearance from the Civic and had a nicer interior but was mechanically nearly identical to the US-market Civic EX sedan. A version for the Japanese market was built in Canada and exported across the Pacific as the second-generation Honda Domani. The engine is a 1.6-liter SOHC four-banger with VTEC, rated at 127 horsepower and 107 pound-feet. This one appears to be a loaded EL Premium, with the optional four-speed automatic. List price would have been C$22,000, or about $30,676 in 2023 United States dollars (using the exchange rate for June of 1997). The decklid had an EL-only spoiler, so a local Honda expert must have bought it for a Civic sedan. Since this car was old enough to be federally legal under the 25-year rule, it could have been registered legally in some US states… but California's strict emissions regulations would have made the process too difficult to be worth undertaking on a near-300k-mile machine that isn't particularly exotic.

These were our favorite cars of 2022

Favorite cars is different than best cars. The idea of "best" can speak to value and overall competitiveness in a given vehicle segment. There's lots of objectivity involved and to do a "best" list right, one really must be very thorough and as scientific as possible. This is not that list. This is about our favorites, so objectivity be damned. If we liked a Challenger Hellcat because it made loud noises or a Honda Odyssey because it made for a particularly special family vacation, fair game. These were the cars that most spoke to our collection of editors and the ones that stayed in our minds and hung in our hearts long after they left our driveway. — Senior Editor James Riswick 2022 GMC Hummer EV Senior Editor, Green, John Beltz Snyder: I didn't particularly expect to like the new Hummer. I wasn't a fan of the Hummer H2 or H3, so I wasn't automatically enthusiastic about this electric reboot. Fast EVs aren't hard to come by — and, in fact, may be too easy to come by — so its performance specs weren't enough to win me over. Despite videos to the contrary, pickups aren't my favorite vehicular format. And its excessive size and weight turned me off ... until I finally got behind the wheel.  This thing is wildly entertaining to drive. Watts to Freedom launch control is a neat party trick, sure, but the novelty wears off quickly. The novelty of Crab Walk, however, has staying power. The rear-wheel steering makes this behemoth feel much smaller than it is — the maneuverability is incredible, and useful. The air suspension provides tons of clearance, including a ridiculously high-riding Extract mode. I can't wait for lesser versions of the Hummer to make their way to market. Give me less power (for less money), but keep the off-road tricks onboard, and I'll be a happy camper. Senior Editor, Consumer, Jeremy Korzeniewski: If I could afford to put one of these in my driveway, I would. Sadly, I can't, so I won't (What's that, Janet? I got the lyric wrong?). Still, I love the dumb thing. Thankfully, I have another choice down below. 2022 Porsche 911 GT3 Associate Editor Byron Hurd: Yeah, duh, Porsches are good. But there's good, and then there's GT3. This is the feeling every performance-oriented RWD tuner is trying to replicate. This is hard, precise, surgical and immensely satisfying. To begin to explore this car on a public road is by itself an admission that you believe yourself to be above the rules as they apply to normal drivers.