If you're the type of consumer who forgoes wearing the latest fashion or getting your hands on the hottest new gadget and instead prefers to pick up less trendy products at a discounted price, now is a great time to shop for a new vehicle.

Redesigns are proliferating as automakers rebound from the recession and years of declining sales -- and for bargain shoppers who care little about owning the latest body style, deals can be found on models that are scheduled for a refresh.

 

Before newly redesigned vehicles hit dealer lots this fall, automakers are looking to unload last year's models, according to Kelly Blue Book. This means new-car shoppers will have an abundance of competitive offerings available in nearly every vehicle segment. 

 

"Many shoppers are simply looking for the best deal available," says Alec Gutierrez, senior market analyst of automotive insights for Kelley Blue Book, in a press release. "Vehicles typically are redesigned on a five-year cycle. Being aware of which models will soon be redesigned is a good way to get a new car and still keep some of your money in the bank."

 

Which long-in-the-tooth vehicles should you look for?

 

Nissan North America has launched production in Tennessee of the redesigned 2013 Altima sedan that it hopes will challenge the family-sedan supremacy of the Toyota Camry.

"We didn't put all of the investment into this product and put in all the features with an expectation to be No. 2," said Bill Krueger, vice chairman of Nissan Americas, after the first 2013 model rolled off the line in Smyrna, Tenn., on May 15. "Ultimately the consumer's going to vote with their purchase whether or not we sell more than anyone else."

The Altima has lagged for most of its 20-year life as the also-ran among family sedans. But in the months following the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, it leapt into the segment's No. 2 spot, bypassing the Honda Accord and nipping closely at the market leading Camry.

 

Britain is set to join Spain, Australia and Germany in passing legislation to prohibit drivers from getting behind the wheel while impaired by drugs -- an increasingly serious problem in both Europe and the U.S. “Drug drivers are a deadly menace," Mike Penning, the U.K.'s road safety minister, told The Telegraph. "They must be stopped, and that is exactly what I intend to do." 

Automakers are constantly trying to reduce the weight of their vehicles to improve fuel economy. They shave off a few pounds here and there by using lightweight materials and other means.

 

That’s the reason Michael Arbaugh, interior design chief for Ford, recently declared the compact disc antiquated technology and proposed that the CD player be jettisoned from the dashboard to save about 5 pounds per car.

 

Five pounds might not seem significant when a vehicle can weigh from 3,000 up to even 10,000 pounds. But automakers have to consider every possible option to conform to stringent new federal fuel-economy standards.

 

By 2016, the U.S. fleet average for automakers must attain 34.1 mpg for all vehicles, compared with 27.5 mpg for passenger cars and 23.5 mpg for light trucks in 2010. By 2025, automakers must achieve a corporate average fuel-economy (CAFE) standard of 54.5 mpg -- nearly double the current requirement.

 

Arbaugh pointed out that ditching the in-dash CD player would not only shed precious pounds from a vehicle’s overall weight, but also free up valuable dashboard real estate that could be used for other features. “That's oceanfront property when you are talking about the center stack,” Arbaugh was quoted by the Detroit Free Press as saying at an event in Detroit last week.

 

While BMW employs a digitally sanitized/perfected sound file to give M5 owners the proper sense of aggro urgency when motoring at pace, Porsche went a little more organic with its employment of a sound symposer to feed the 911's flat-six growl into the cabin of the extra-refined 991.

Essentially, the sound symposer is an electrically controlled diaphragm in a tuned sound tube that brings the proper engine noises into the passenger compartment. It can be opened and closed by the car's onboard electronics to offer snarl when you want it and serenity when you don't.

The whole thing sounds a mite gimmicky, but trust us, it's actually pretty wonderful in operation.

 

As Google holds the first-ever driver's license for an unmanned car and Cadillac prepares its auto-pilot Super Cruise feature for production, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology remain skeptical over the technology's exciting promises.

"Knowing where the road is is only part of the answer," said Jonathan How, an astronautics professor, at MIT last Friday. "If the automated system can't handle it and throws it back to me, what am I supposed to do?"

How was speaking at an industry conference held by the university and the New England Motor Press Association, alongside panelists from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and Kia. His attitude, as well as that of Bryan Reimer, a research engineer at the MIT AgeLab, was a sharp check against the upbeat, optimistic take held by leading automakers such as Mercedes, which is developing a system for the next S-Class that can read the entire road surface.

After MIT's autonomous Land Rover collided with a Suburban entered by Cornell University in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a government-sponsored​ competition to test fully autonomous vehicles for military use, the university has been focusing on "intent recognition," a human trait that software has not been able to mimic well. 

According to its quarterly report, Tesla is planning to begin deliveries of the Model S sedan this June, not July, as had been earlier announced. Tesla is just waiting to finish crash testing the Model S and obtain final ratings from the EPA for the car’s range and MPGe (the electric equivalent to fuel economy) and to conclude paperwork for its NHTSA crash certifications. The report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, gives a good glimpse at the inside of otherwise-secretive Tesla.

• The Model X crossover, which debuted in prototype form last February, is scheduled to enter production in late 2013 with “significant” deliveries happening in 2014.
• Tesla describes the Model X as “the first vehicle we intend to develop by leveraging the Model S platform.” Intention is different from actually doing, but this tells us at least that the company has other products on the drawing board.
• More dealerships are scheduled to open this year, which makes sense—the Model S is supposed to sell in much larger numbers than the roadster did, and more dealers will be needed to do that.
• Even though the Model S is targeted—sort of—at cars that a large percentage of customers lease, such as the Audi A6 and BMW 5-series, Tesla isn’t planning a lease program for its car.

 

“Black box” is such a sinister-sounding term, and probably makes most people think of either spying or plane crashes. Event data recorder, the official name for an automotive black box, is more benign, which may help U.S. lawmakers in their push to require automakers to include the devices in all new cars.

 

The Senate has already passed Bill 1813, which mandates EDRs for every car sold in the U.S. starting with model year 2015, and the House is expected to pass a similar statute. But the specifics of the bills are still ambiguous and will likely change before becoming law.

 

One thing, however, is certain: Federal law will require that a standard set of data prescribed by the Transportation Department be recorded by car black boxes. This will likely include 15 different measurements such as force of impact, seatbelt status, airbag deployment and throttle position. The last one is largely the result of the unintended-accelerat​ion controversy that affected Toyota, according to a high-ranking National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official.

The bills will also address who owns the data from black boxes.