What is the best way to modify the Car Tutorial for more cars?

I've done some extensive work on the Car Tutorial, making my own levels, checking for whether on the road, adding a speedometer and tachometer. Now I want to change the car. I was thinking I could just load a different .fbx at runtime and change the stats on the car for suspension and acceleration, etc. To that end, I was thinking of storing all the information for all of the cars in an XML file, and basically selecting a car from the list of cars in the xml file. Three questions: 1. Is that the best way to handle this? 2. I've noticed that the car is not just a single fbx, and that I'd need to load my fbx, and set a texture/material. Is there any direction/tutorials on loading and skinning a car (that can be used with the tutorial) at runtime? 3. Does Unity offer native support for reading/writing XML files or will I need to write my own class?