Come June, Toyota “plans to bring domestic auto production back to as much as 90 percent of targets set before the March earthquake hit, thanks to faster-than-expected improvements in parts supplies,” The Nikkei [sub] writes today. At the annual results conference in Tokyo, Akio Toyoda had said Toyota Toyoda would be on its way back to normal beginning in June, with hopefully 70 percent of production reinstated in summer. This was already a two month improvement over previous plans. Two weeks later, the outlook seems to be even better. If The Nikkei heard correctly. Read More >
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Category: Japan
According to one car guy, global warming is a crock of excrement. Toyota wants to get to the bottom of it. Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Central R&D Labs have developed a simulator able to predict tropospheric ozone concentrations across the whole of South and East Asia. Read More >
Last January, Toyota’s Prez Akio Toyoda visited Salesforce.com CEO and cloud computing proselytizer extraordinaire Mark Benioff in Benioff’s sprawling compound on the Big Island of Hawaii.
“The biggest problem” that faces widespread adoption of electric vehicles, “is striking a balance between performance and price.” The man who said that, Hiroshi Shimizu, thinks he has the solution to this problem. It is not generous subsidies. It is not miracle batteries. It is a technology his company has been developing over many years: In-wheel electric motors. Shimizu’s company , “SIM-Drive Corp. a Keio University-linked venture company, on Wednesday unveiled a prototype of its SIM-LEI electric vehicle that can travel up to 333 kilometers (206 miles) on a single battery charge,” writes Japan’s Jiji Press. Read More >
With all the news about earthquakes and tsunamis, you would think that the lots of your favorite ricer retailer are bare. They aren’t. But some dealers hang on to what they have got and sell it at healthy mark-ups, assuming that the pipeline will run dry. Both Honda and Nissan are unhappy with this perception and tell their dealers to move the metal. “Honda told its U.S. dealers Friday that July vehicle deliveries would increase by 11% from June levels and accelerate in August as the auto maker ramps up production after the March 11 earthquake in Japan,” says The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >
How do you make money with small cars? You make it up with volume. The Japanese market for the very Japanese minivehicles, or kei cars, is shrinking. So what do manufacturers do? They circle the diminutive wagons and forge joint ventures. Read More >
The ripple effects of the March 11 tsunami keep bouncing around the globe. The is good news and bad news. (Or bad news and good news, depending on the side you are on.) Read More >
A study of A.T. Kearney Management Consultants (for what such a study is worth) foresees that 13.2 million cars will be sold in the U.S. this year. It could be more, but the consultants reckon that “in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, parts shortages will impact 2011 U.S. new vehicle sales by 200,000 units.” In the disaster, A.T. Kearney sees a golden opportunity: “Given what we know about production downtime, in 2011 we see 328,000 U.S. customers of the affected brands up for grabs, and more if the time to wait for a particular brand begins to extend.” Read More >
Automakers in Japan are slowly crawling back to normal. However, they are in for another after shock, and this one could be quite serious: Yasushi Akao, President of chipmaker Renesas said today that supplies of microcontrollers from his company will be in serious trouble come June. According to The Nikkei [sub], “stocks are expected to run out next month as operations at the firm’s Naka plant in Ibaraki Prefecture have been suspended since the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11.” Renesas microcontrollers are the chips of choice of many car companies who use them in their on-board electronics. Toyota is known to be a large customer of Renesas. Read More >
“Due to our proximity to the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, in the beginning, some suppliers and some contractors had problems coming to the plant because there was that uncertainty of radiation,” says Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn today, standing in front of the final assembly station of Nissan V6 engines made in their plant in Iwaki. That plant indeed is only some 60 miles from the Fukushima power plant, and that’s where we are today.
Logic makes you think that used cars sales would skyrocket at the moment in Japan. The auto industry barely has started producing and will not be back to normal before the end of the year. Hundreds of thousands of cars have been destroyed. In Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture alone, 146,000 cars are estimated to have been severely damaged or destroyed, 10 percent of the 1,540,000 cars registered in the Prefecture. Used cars should be flying off the lots. But the opposite is true. Read More >
“If you have no cars, you will lose market share,” said double-CEO Carlos Ghosn at last week’s annual results conference of Nissan. He said openly what other carmakers on the other side of the Pacific only dare to whisper into the ears of sympathetic reporters, or via analysts at banks and brokerages: The March 11 tsunami will cost Japanese makers big chunks of market share. The questions is: For how long? Read More >
In a normal world, an automaker wants to time the announcement of a new car just right: In time to build anticipation. Not too early, because that would hurt sales of last year’s models. In Japan, they keep things simple and have the press event the day the car goes on sale. Today, I was at a press event in Tokyo that celebrated the Prius Alpha, a bigger, roomier minivanish Prius that can seat 7. If you’d order it today, you would get your car in a distant future, in April 2012. No typo. 11 months from now. Next year.
Welcome to the new world of post-tsunami car launches. Read More >
Further on today’s results conference at Nissan, I could regale (or most likely bore) you with what you will hear from just about any Japanese carmaker, and possibly from non-Japanese carmakers as well: Last year was a good year, the March 11 tsunami makes this year a challenging year, but what will not kill us makes us stronger, and in ancient China, crisis and opportunity were one and the same.
Now this is Nissan and Carlos Ghosn who has bet a farm in France and one in Japan on the future of the electric car. Ghosn made a few points today that are well worth noting. He talked about nukes, CO2, blackouts – and batteries.
Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn treated reporters to his trademark Gallic body language and quick-witted repartees during the presentation of the fiscal year 2010 results today at Nissan’s swank waterfront headquarters in Yokohama. Ghosn delighted stockholders and analysts with the news that Japan’s #2 automaker made a net profit of 319.2 billion yen (US $3.72 billion) on net revenues of 8.7731 trillion yen (US $102.37 billion). Operating profit was 537.5 billion yen (US $6.27 billion). Ghosn created much happiness by announcing that the last quarter of the fiscal year, which ended on March 31, resulted in an operating profit of 88.6 billion yen ($1.1 billion), also exceeding expectations. Read More >
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