1997 Toyota Avalon Xl Sedan 4-door 3.0l on 2040-cars

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Mystery shoppers love Infiniti, hate Tesla

Infiniti, followed by Lexus tied with Mercedes-Benz took the top two spots for best sales experience according to mystery shoppers from the latest Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index, while EV manufacturer Tesla recorded the lowest overall score. Not surprisingly, premium brands dominated the top ranks. Including the three already mentioned, luxury brands occupied seven of the top ten spots and included Audi, BMW, Porsche, and the only American brand to crack the upper echelon, Cadillac. Toyota, Volkswagen, and Nissan rounded out the first ten positions. The news for domestic automakers isn't good. Aside from Caddy, the only other star-spangled automaker to score above the industry average is Chrysler. The rest of FCA, most of GM, and all of Ford fell below the line. But Pied Piper's mystery shoppers handed Tesla the biggest walloping – the company is ten full points below the next lowest brand, Volvo, and its score of 86 is 17 below the average of 103. It's baffling, considering the company's touted direct-sales model. "Tesla leaves me scratching my head," Fred O'Hagan, Pied Piper's president and CEO, told Wards Auto. "They own all of their stores, so you would think each one would be doing the same thing. But they're not. Tesla is consistent in its inconsistencies." O'Hagan added that there's a "huge variation" in Tesla's store-to-store effectiveness, and that in some cases, shoppers found showroom workers that acted more like "museum curators," Wards Auto reports. It might be popular to call Tesla the Apple of the car world, but based on Pied Piper's work, the brand has a long way to go to emulate the uniform shopping experience of an Apple Store. The news might be bad for Tesla, but even for the brands that scored below average, there's cause for celebration. Only Tesla and Mini lost points in this year's rankings, and only Mercedes and Lincoln held steady. Every other brand, including Infiniti, which topped the index for the first time, gained at least one point. The biggest improvements belong to Porsche, Land Rover, and Mitsubishi, which all jumped five points. Pied Piper's annual Prospect Satisfaction Index uses mystery shoppers – over 6,100 this year – from across the country to assess dealers and generate rankings from over 50 individual factors. News Source: Pied Piper via WardsAuto Green Audi BMW Cadillac Chrysler Infiniti Lexus Mercedes-Benz Nissan Tesla Toyota Car Buying Car Dealers study

U.S. and Toyota Reach Settlement Over Safety Problems Disclosure

The U.S. has reached a $1.2 billion settlement with Toyota Motor Corp., concluding a four-year criminal investigation into the Japanese automaker's disclosure of safety problems, according to a person close to the investigation. Attorney General Eric Holder, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, were announcing the settlement Wednesday morning, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the settlement on the record before the announcement. TOP 5Most Researched Green Cars On AOL Autos 2013 Honda Fit EV MSRP : $36,625 2014 Chevrolet Spark EV MSRP : $26,685 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV MSRP : $29,125 2012 Ford Focus Electric MSRP : $39,200 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-in MSRP : $32,000 In a statement early Wednesday, Toyota said it has "cooperated with the U.S. Attorney's office in this matter for more than four years" and had "made fundamental changes to become a more responsive and customer-focused organization, and we are committed to continued improvements." The criminal investigation focused on whether Toyota was forthright in reporting problems related to unintended acceleration troubles. Starting in 2009, Toyota issued massive recalls, mostly in the U.S., totaling more than 10 million vehicles for various problems including faulty brakes, gas pedals and floor mats. From 2010 through 2012, Toyota Motor Corp. paid fines totaling more than $66 million for delays in reporting unintended acceleration problems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration never found defects in electronics or software in Toyota cars, which had been targeted as a possible cause. The settlement continues a string of bad publicity for Toyota, which before the unintended acceleration cases had a bulletproof image of reliability. Since the cases surfaced, the company's brand image has been damaged and it has lost U.S. market share as competition has intensified. Last year, Toyota agreed to pay more than $1 billion to resolve hundreds of lawsuits claiming that owners of its cars suffered economic losses because of the recalls. But that settlement did not include wrongful death and injury lawsuits that have been consolidated in California state and federal courts. In December, Toyota filed court papers after a four-year legal battle saying that it's in settlement talks on nearly 400 U.S. lawsuits, but other cases aren't included in the talks.

2014 Toyota Corolla coming Thursday, now with LED headlamps

Here's what we know about the redesigned 2014 Toyota Corolla: It will have "aggressive new styling" with "available seventeen-inch alloy wheels" an "available touch screen audio" system and "available LED headlights."
We know all of this because Toyota has seen fit to release a small assortment of teaser images of the 2014 Corolla, with those descriptions attached. The latest to hit the web shows LED lighting clusters, which, to Toyota's credit, don't appear to merely mimic designs already seen in the automotive world.
We should point out that the headlights do share a link to the units seen on the Furia Concept that was supposed to foreshadow the next Corolla, though the most interesting bits - namely the honeycomb inner pattern - have been chucked while the somewhat trapezoidal main units remain intact.