Best- and worst-selling cars by company

Some successful cars, such as the Chrysler 300 sedan from DaimlerChrysler, sell in high volumes but are not in the slide show; the 300 is not as high-volume as Chrysler's Town & Country minivan.

As a general rule, zippy sports cars such as Audi's TT and Nissan Motor's 350Z are fairly low-volume, as are most ultra-luxury cars, such as Ferrari, Bentley and Rolls-Royce models. Is the Corvette Chevrolet's biggest seller? Not at all. Does parent General Motors consider it a failure? With a MSRP starting at $44,490 and sales of 32,489, emphatically not.

We excluded such blue-blooded manufacturers as Maybach from the slide show because all of their cars sell in low numbers. And some such brands do not disclose sales by model line.

In determining each manufacturer's lowest-selling car, we only considered nameplates that were on the U.S. market for each month of 2005, because calling a vehicle that just came out "low-selling" hardly seems to afford the new model a chance.

Wherever possible, the sources for sales figures were the manufacturers. Automotive News was our backup source.

A final note on methodology: We ran into some difficulty determining which vehicles to consider out of production. When an automaker overhauls a car, it will often stop production of the outgoing model a bit before it begins building the replacement. In some cases, the delay is lengthy. For example, Volvo's C70 convertible and Land Rover's Freelander SUV have been out of production for a while, awaiting replacements; we therefore did not include those cars in our calculations. By the same token, we did not evaluate the performance of Volkswagen's Phaeton sedan, which the company is phasing out of American dealerships.

However, we did include Mercedes'CL-Class coupe in our calculations, even though the model is in its final full year on the market and is "in runout," according to a recent e-mail from a Mercedes spokeswoman (CL sales, consequently, went in the tank in 2005). But Mercedes is still advertising the car, whereas Volvo is not advertising the C70, nor Land Rover the Freelander. In determining whether to include or exclude a vehicle in our calculations — when we weren't sure how to characterize a car's status — the mitigating question was, "Is the automaker's Web site still listing the car as part of the company's vehicle lineup?"

Please follow the link below to see automakers' bread-and-butter vehicles — and the cars that are either acquired tastes, rare treats or ones for which the public has little apparent appetite.

Note: At press time, the following automakers had not confirmed information in the slide show, despite multiple e-mail messages from Forbes.com requesting them to do so: Honda Motor, Nissan Motor, Kia, Mercedes-Benz and Mitsubishi.

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