I’ve been writing about the rising good news in the auto industry for most of this year. Automakers, including taxpayer-braced, “Old”/”New,” marketing-disheveled GM, keep reporting how well their sales — U.S. and otherwise, but especially U.S. — improved not just month over month from year-ago numbers, but practically month over month since January.

The automotive news nowadays abounds with such upbeat-worthy items as the economy is certainly improving, consumers are beginning to spend again and Wall Street pushes the Dow over 11,000 (now and again). Oil companies reported, again, record profits (except for BP, with its Gulf oil rig catastrophe). Ford touts its big profits. GM, too (although, will there be consumer fallout should the automaker be taken to task over its claims that its “complete” payback of the borrowed bailout isn’t all as claimed). Volkswagen declared a near-triple gain in profit over loss from April 2009 to April 2010.

Research points to the steady growth of Internet car buying. There are the eBays, Craigslists, AutoTraders, CarsDirects, Cars.coms and others ad infinitum offering new, near-new, old, antique, rebuilt, restyled and so on vehicles. As well, virtually every automaker provides its models with retail base and option add-on prices on its own website. Brick-and-mortar dealers, of course, have for several years hawked their vehicles online.

Are pickup sales picking up?

After fuel prices dramatically rose during the summer of 2008, followed by the dramatic fall of the economy in 2009, pickups and big SUVS fell out of favor with American consumers. Some traded them in for fuel-friendly cars during 2009’s “cash for clunkers” program.

Some put for-sale signs on them just hoping someone else would come along and take their box-on-body fuel eater off their hands. Others figured they’d already paid for the vehicle, so they’d just keep it. The reasons are as varied as there are individuals. In any case truck sales in 2008 and 2009 plummeted even more than those of automobiles.

But is that trend doing a one-eighty?

“Oh what a feeling! Toyota.”
The slogan and jingle of the 1980s is hauntingly harassing Toyota 30 years later.
And with ironic cause.
Toyota went from the car manufacturer of high regard, high quality and high-volume sales to a company on the verge of a nervous breakdown. All because of the now-infamous accelerator, and followed by the carmaker’s brake problem emerging with its hybrid Prius, the best-selling of hybrid passenger cars, and some Lexus hybrids.