CNN has a fascinating article about the "Ten hottest cars in America" which is not good reading for any company other than Toyota. The top 10 cars are:
Toyota Prius
Mini Cooper
Pontiac Solstice
Scion xA
Scion xB
Scion tC
Lexus RX400h
Honda Civic
Toyota Rav4
Ford Escape Hybrid
Since Scion and Lexus are Toyota brands that makes 6 out of 10 coming from big T. BMW (Mini), Honda, GM(Pontiac) and Ford get one each to round out the list. This is not an uncontroversial selection and its methodology is potentially suspect but it seems to me that its base idea is good. It isn't a list of top sellers but rather a list of cars where demand appears to be outstripping supply - and in the oversupplied car market this is a rare thing - and hence also indicates the cars that are most likely to be making profits for their manufacturers.
To find the 10 hottest cars in America for CNNMoney.com, Edmunds.com, a partner providing data and content for CNN Web sites, looked for three things: Actual selling prices closest to the vehicle's full sticker price; lowest amounts in rebates or other sales incentives; shortest times spent on dealer lots before being snapped up by buyers.
One truly fascinating thing is the way that with Scion (and Lexus), Toyota is doing its best to introduce the best of Japanese new car sales practise to the USA such as reducing haggle, build to order and customer satisfaction is not an after-thought. The Japanese method is not perfect but parts of it are certainly vast improvements on the equivalent process in the USA where "customer satisfaction" is a phrase that most dealers couldn't spell let alone implement.