The year 2016 might have been the most lively and interesting I've ever experienced and I've been covering the auto industry for over a decade.
From General Motors to Uber and Tesla to Donald Trump, the stories came fast and furious.
It was hard, at times, to keep up.
But we pulled it off. Here are the ten biggest car stories of 2016:
SEE ALSO: Tesla's biggest moments of 2016
10. The booming US auto market.
In 2015, US auto sales set a new record when 17.5 million new cars and trucks rolled off dealer lots. The industry had decisively recovered from the dark days of the financial crisis, a period when the sales pace fell at one point below 10 million, an apocalyptic situation.
The numbers aren't in yet for 2016, but the sales pace has been as strong as it was in 2015. Still, though, there's been much discussion and debate in the industry about whether the market has plateaued at a "historically high level," as Ford CEO mark Fields has put it. Regardless, 2016 could see the 2015 sales record broken.
This is a boom, no doubt about it. It's also a profitable boom, as automakers in the US sell a lot of pickup trucks and SUVs, amid relatively low gas prices.
9. Risky new trends in auto lending.
With a booming sales market comes booming credit: the vast majority of new vehicles are financed.
In the past, loans were structured to run five years before the car or truck was paid off. But after the financial crisis, some lenders got aggressive about capturing subprime borrowers, people with damaged credit who still needed a vehicle.
Lenders also began to stretch out loan terms in order to create an appealing monthly payment number and enabled a borrower to get into a more expensive car or truck.
However, this now means that some borrowers will be "underwater" or in a negative-equity position with their car loan. This has raised some alarms about lending practices. In 2017, the lending story is likely to get more intense, as the plateaued market compels automakers to maintain their slice of the sales pie.
8. Fiat Chrysler ends passenger-car production in the US.
Because profits are so much higher for pickups and SUVs — and because that's what US consumer want to buy — automakers are shifting their production mix to favor those vehicles.
FCA took the plunge in 2016 to end all passenger car production in the US, moving it to Mexico to free up factory capacity to build more trucks.
FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne has been bold in his statements about this decision and the underlying market trend. He has said that a structural shift is happening and that passenger cars will never come back in the US, even if gas prices spike.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider