Highway 1 Quiz Winners: The Mugs Are in the Mail

The people have spoken, and we’re pleased to report that there’s enough auto industry knowledge out there to make our revived Highway 1 Quiz an unqualified success.

We’ll be mailing genuine stainless steel Highway 1 commuter mugs to the first 25 informed individuals who correctly answered the query we posed in our Dec. 27 issue, to wit:

It would seem, these days, that the auto industry is consolidating into a dense mass that would make a Krispy Kreme jealous. Ford, as we’ve seen, owns or controls half a dozen other car companies; Chrysler was absorbed by Daimler-Benz and the resulting DaimlerChrysler now owns pieces of several other auto makers, including Mitsubishi. Renault controls Nissan. GM owns Saab and pieces of Suzuki, Subaru, Isuzu and Fiat. Hyundai owns Kia. Volkswagen is paterfamilias to Audi and Rolls-Royce. Is there no one left standing alone? The answer is yes, there are five, and we know who. Can you name three of them?

Answers ranged from the far out (sorry, but Lincoln is not an independent brand--it has long been part of Ford) to good guesses that nevertheless were wrong (Ferrari is not an indie but owned by Fiat, and VW’s Audi subsidiary owns Lamborghini).

Volvo and Jaguar (both part of Ford) were popular answers, as was Bentley (owned by Volkswagen).

Specialty makers Morgan, Panoz and Saleen craft beautiful cars but in such small numbers that they are not properly counted with the major manufacturers.

Here are the correct answers, as determined by Highway 1 in consultation with the automotive industry specialists at J.D. Power & Associates in Agoura Hills and Auto-Pacific Inc. in Tustin.

Because other references in Highway 1 on Dec. 27 might have caused some confusion, we decided to accept any three of the six following auto makers as correct answers:

* Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW, if you please, Germany. (It acquires the rights to the Rolls-Royce name from Volkswagen in 2003 but doesn’t own any other car maker since selling the Land Rover brand to Ford and the Rover Group to a British investment consortium last year.)

* Daewoo Motor Co., South Korea. (Yes, it’s bankrupt and probably will belong to someone else by this summer, but for now it remains an independent.)

* Honda Motor Co., Japan.

* Porsche, Germany.

* PSA Peugeot-Citroen, France. (Yes, Peugeot and Citroen once were separate companies, but the merger took place more than 20 years ago, so as far as our experts are concerned, it now is a single, independent company.)

* Toyota Motor Corp., Japan. (We accepted this as correct even though the auto maker owns 51% of Daihatsu in its home country and also operates a factory with GM in Northern California.)