Checkered Flag: Best and Worst Selling Cars of '07

Every mainstream automaker wants to sell as many cars as it can for as much money as possible.

Each also knows it can't do that.

So it designs different models for different price points and calculates production to match anticipated demand. Automakers love it when cars, especially higher-priced ones, sell out, and hate it when cars are left languishing on showroom floors, burning holes in the companies' and the dealers' pockets.

Click here to see the best and worst selling cars of 2007 at our partner site, Forbes.com.

In some ways, the title above is a misnomer, because for many manufacturers the "worst" sellers are simply the cars with the lowest sales volumes and often the highest prices.

For example, Mercedes-Benz's lowest-selling car in 2006, the limited-production SLR McLaren coupe, was also, at $453,000, far and away its most expensive. The same can be said for Dodge's $82,000 Viper sports car and Land Rover's $77,000 Range Rover SUV. Exotic, one-of-a-kind flagships are about exclusivity, not high sales.

Of course, plenty of cars--even top-of-the-line models--are true sales disappointments. These include Acura's flagship RL sedan, the sales of which declined 35% to 12,000 units in 2006. Acura's lowest-selling vehicle, the RL had sales in 2006 that matched only 37% of the sales of Mercedes' flagship sedan, the S-Class.

Our reporting here features a special set of ground rules that makes our list more than something one could find by reading individual automakers' sales reports. For example, in determining the lowest-selling cars, we did not count cars that were discontinued last year or are in the process of being killed, such as Acura's entry-level RSX coupe.

A car's sales plummet when it is phased out of production, but sales also tend to decline when an automaker overhauls a nameplate, either because customers forego the old model and await the new one, or because the automaker ends the old model's production before building the new one.

So in compiling our list, we also excluded from consideration cars that are being replaced and cars that were replaced by overhauled vehicles (i.e. not just "face lifted" models--lightly revised ones) in 2006.