Turns out the perfect franchise to have in 2015 was selling Italian SUVs worth more than $200,000. Failing that, pretty much any super car dealership would do with a line of small SUVs on the side.
That's one of the many stories in the detail behind the headline of record motor vehicle sales last year. There was much more to the fine print than the diminishing importance of Holden and Ford - it's pretty much the story of the Australian economy.
Vehicle sales are a good guide to who is spending what sort of money where. The hard numbers sort the fact from the fiction - such as the alleged outrage over Volkswagen's pollution fraud when people actually bought more Veedubs.  
The record 1,155,408 vehicles sold last year obviously mean the Australian economy wasn't doing nearly as badly as we sometimes liked to tell ourselves. Car yards don't do increased business in hard times.
And it shouldn't be a surprise that NSW led the mainland with sales growth of 6.9 per cent, nearly double the national average of 3.8 per cent. It's another illustration of what's been said before in this space: NSW is quietly booming. 
On the other hand, WA sales were down nearly 7.9 per cent. Yes, the tide has indeed turned.
(The very best growth was in Tasmania, up 12 per cent, albeit to just 19,683 compared with NSW's 380,858. It confirms the tourism revival and employment growth that are lifting the island off the floor.)
Nationally, it was encouraging that business sales grew most strongly, up 4.9 per cent while private buyers grew by 3.7. Another hint that business is spending more than some ABS surveys indicate. Government sales were down 1.4 per cent.
One trend remained firmly in place: the SUV boom. SUV sales grew by 15.9 per cent and their market share increased from 31.7 per cent in 2014 to 35.4 per cent.
But on percentages, the really big movement was at the top of the market - the fastest-growing segment, up 17.3 per cent, was sports cars costing more than $200,000.
That's reflected in the three fastest-growing marques - Porsche up 45 per cent, Ferrari up 48 per cent and Lamborghini soaring 211 per cent.
OK, there were only 84 Lambos sold, but it was still a big percentage gain.
That's in keeping with the surge in top-end real estate sales. If you've just shelled out eight-figures for a mansion, you have to accessorise the garages.
Other super cars didn't do badly either - Maserati sales were up 29.4 per cent to 519, McLaren up 38.5 per cent to 36, Aston Martin up 21.5 per cent to 130 - and that's before the latest Bond movie had a chance to kick in.
Even in such fancy company, the SUV effect could be seen. All of Porsche's sales growth in effect came from its medium-sized Macan SUV - 2004 of them out of total Porsche sales of 4090.
The fastest-growing "affordable" marque was Mini, up 30 per cent to 3342 units.
And at the other end of the game, the Toyota Corolla remained our most popular car with more than 42,000 sold - but it says plenty about the diversity of our market that the No.1 seller had just 3.6 per cent market share.
The full VFACTS figures from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries also tell stories about how serious - or not - we are about being green.
Private buyers purchased 11.5 per cent fewer hybrid cars last year - 2697 of them - but hybrid SUV sales more than doubled to 1152. The former green machine leader, the Prius, saw sales drop nearly 26 per cent.
And for all the hype about electric cars, private buyers only purchased 210 of them, enough to deliver 59 per cent percentage growth at this still-early stage of what's set to be a rapid evolution.
While super cars were the big winners, Chinese-made vehicles were major losers.
Sales of Chinese-made vehicles dropped 44 per cent - the Cherry hitting the Great Wall, so to speak.
But all of that is now history. What's next for car sales promises to be interesting. A Reserve Bank study found a very strong correlation between rising house prices and car sales - a 1 per cent rise in house prices tended to result in a half per cent rise in new vehicle sales. 
That study held true enough in 2015. If it does again in 2016 with house prices either flattening or falling this year, it won't be as flash a year in the car yards - exotic European SUVs notwithstanding.