At the launch event for the 2012 Toyota Camry, the presenting executive noted price reductions of up to $2,000. Quite often such reductions are accomplished by deleting previously standard features. Case in point: the 2012 Volkswagen Passat, where we found that once you adjust for feature differences a $7,180 price drop shrunk to a much smaller, if still substantial, $2,400. So with the redesigned Camry I withheld commenting on the price reduction until I could run the car through TrueDelta’s car price comparison tool.
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Category: Toyota
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Toyota ReviewsToyota Motor Co., the world’s largest automaker, has been producing cars for more than 70 years. It wasn’t until after World War II, however, that production started to pick up. Toyota went from making 8,500 cars a year in 1955 to 600,000 in 1965. Models like the Toyopet and Land Cruiser hit the United States in 1957. Today Toyota is among the leaders when it comes to hybrid technology. |
It’s here: after much talk, hype, third-party conversions, hand-wringing, and other drama, Toyota has finally announced the plug-in Prius. It starts at $32,000 plus destination… but the one you really want will cost you a cool forty G. Click the jump for availability, specs, and some personal hand-wringing.
The rules for the Billetproof show are simple: Nothing newer than 1964, no trailered vehicles, no post-1960s mag wheels, no fenderless cars with independent front suspensions, and— above all— no billet anything! I flew out to California Saturday to check it out. Read More >
I’ve often wondered if there is a relationship between the decline of the automobile’s cultural relevance, and the decline of the larger-than-life auto executive. Clearly the car’s waning ability to excite, inspire and shape material culture is a complex phenomenon with no single cause, but it’s got to have some kind of connection to the people making the cars. After all, the original Mustangs, Corvettes, and Model Ts emerged from firms led by such oversized presences as Lee Iacocca, Bill Mitchell and the original car-guy-as-folk-hero, Henry Ford. Today there’s no shortage of brilliant, engaging, passionate people working in the car industry, and yet few contemporary executives have made the kind of cultural impact that their predecessors once did. This, in a nutshell, is why Bob Lutz fascinates me: though he never made as wide of a mark on popular culture as an Iacocca or DeLorean, he’s one of the last remaining links to an era in the car industry that now seems impossibly out of reach.
But because he is not a man of the times, it’s incredibly easy to misunderstand the guy. In fact, having spent several hours chatting with him on and off the record, I’d argue that the best anyone can hope for is to simply not misunderstand him. In that spirit, I’ve assembled ten impressions of the man that I found not to be true in our conversation. But be warned: just because these “myths” aren’t completely true doesn’t mean they’re completely untrue either…
Over the last few weeks we’ve been to Botswana, Malta, Bangladesh and Venezuela. Well I have a surprise for you this week: we are going to the most exotic of places – to the eighties! We travel 25 years back in time, back to homely United States of America, and, you know, party like it’s 1986! You are welcome. That’s what friends are for.
Now, I know it is controversial to study the US in an article titled ‘Around The Globe’ but hey, I pride myself to be able to surprise you week after week so you can’t be mad at me for trying… The only thing is, 1986 might be a very bad year for you to remember and a bad idea for me to pick…. could be for any reason (don’t tell me) but it’s ok if so, there are 155 (truly exotic) countries to visit in my blog, and I can tell you it is just great, so click away!
Back to 1986. This was a time when the Top 6 best-selling vehicles in the US and 8 of the Top 10 were all American… Livin’ in America, baby!
Better late than never: Honda is following a long line of other manufacturers to Russia, and will be assembling cars there. This according to a report in The Nikkei [sub]. It is said that Honda has submitted a plan to Russia’s Economy Ministry for the production of 30,000-50,000 cars per year.
The Russian government had been strong-arming the industry for a while. Either set up assembly sites in Russia and enjoy favorable treatment for the parts to come in. Or stay out and face grim import duties that exclude even the average oligarch from your target group. Read More >
The rot-gut whiskey powered good ol’ boys who turned their fleet flite from revenooers into stock car racing must be flipping their ‘40 Fords in their graves. Nah, on second thought, they’d be so proud that their Prohibition-defying race car culture has swept the nation they’d be bemused by the news. Nascar is going effete… uh, green.
After a 2 percent decline in July, registrations of new passenger cars were up a solid 7.7 percent in August. This according to data provided by Europe’s manufacturer association ACEA. Eight months into the year, 8,888,793 new cars were registered in the EU, or 1.3 percent less than in the same period a year ago. Read More >
Both Honda and Toyota have consistently lost market share in China, which is even more embarrassing given the fact that Japanese brands in total still command the largest market share in the Middle Kingdom. This is helped by Nissan, which now holds a bigger share of the Chinese market than Toyota and Honda. Honda does not want to take it any more and is planning a counter-attack at the hearts, minds and wallets of the Chinese customer. Honda will even go as far as giving the Chinese cars that are custom-made for China. Read More >
Since my daily-driver ’92 Civic is about to become a much less civilized car (plus it’s finally made the transition from “somewhat rough” to “total beater,” I need to start shopping for another DD very soon. Since I’ve developed a fascination with Japanese luxury cars of the 1990s (the era before the Japanese Big Three de-Yakuza-ized the souls of their American flagships and started out-German-ing the Germans), I’ve decided it’s time I owned one. The question is: which one? Read More >
Toyota doesn’t sell the Camry in most European markets; it’s wayyy too big and powerful to find favor with our Continental betters. Instead, they offer the Avensis, which was rumored to debut a complete redesign at Frankfurt but instead only showed a minor facelift. It would be overly simplistic to call the Avensis a “Scion tC sedan or wagon” but that does more or less capture the approximate size and nature of the vehicle. The Avensis platform is normally sold with a choice of two-liter, four-cylinder diesel, turbodiesel, and gasoline engines. The 2.5, 180-horsepower four-cylinder from the tC would fit, however.
The Avensis sedan wouldn’t find too many customers Stateside; very few people want to pay Camry money and get less car in return. This little wagon, on the other hand…
Just as Automotive News [sub] failed to cite Bertel’s ahead-of-the-game reporting on Terry Mcauliffe’s GreenTech Automotive firm as the inspiration for its coverage, McAuliffe himself has decided to ignore TTAC’s leadership in order to lash out at the leading industry paper’s write-up on his highly suspect venture. In response to AN [sub]’s piece titled When you do the math, promoter extraordinaire Terry McAuliffe’s grand hybrid vehicle plan just doesn’t add up, the former Clinton fundraiser and DNC chair has written a feisty letter to the editor [sub], in which he argues
The Sept. 5 article about our efforts at GreenTech Automotive (“Real deal?”) stands in stark contrast with the Aug. 28 article in which you reported on partnerships between Toyota and Ford, Tesla, Aston Martin, Lotus and Salesforce.com (“Doing deals, Akio style”). The latter story says Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda “is breaking tradition to transform his ossified giant into a nimble competitor.”
Nimble competition is a key to success in our modern age of change and innovation. Yet you seem to take GreenTech to task for attempting just that. We aren’t trying to be GM, and we never plan on being bailed out by the U.S. government. We are embracing a different, leaner business model in which our world-class partners will play a key role in our success, and we are doing it with private capital.
If the New York Times motto is “all the news that’s fit to print”, then the automotive blogosphere has dined out on the notion of “all the conjecture, baseless rumors and unverified whisperings that’s fit to re-purpose” since Al Gore invented the internet.
Rumors of a new Acura NSX have been one of the staples of online automotive “news”, with the first rumblings shortly after the NSX was euthanized in 2005. Normally I refrain from commenting on these sorts of matters, since they tend to lead to hypertension, foul language and apoplectic tirades, but I have a personal interest in this one.
After the Nixon-head-hood-ornamented Impala’s pilgrimage to the birthplace of Richard Nixon in the spring of 1994, I left Oakland and moved across the Bay to an apartment on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, home of the best burritos in the world. Little did I know that it wouldn’t be long before I’d be packing all my possessions into the Impala and blasting 2,500 miles to the southeast. Read More >
Despite saber-rattling, legal threats and affirmations that Volkswagen does not intend to give up its share in Suzuki, Volkswagen started its climbdown. Ferdinand Piech himself signaled that Volkswagen can go it alone. At the Frankfurt Auto Show, Piech said that Volkswagen is “big enough.” His man Winterkorn quickly fell in step and told Reuters today: “”Suzuki was one option. But we can do it on our own.”
That should be signals enough for everybody at Volkswagen to put the Suzuki saga behind themselves and to concentrate on other pressing business, such as the messy Porsche merger.
Back in Tokyo, The Nikkei [sub] wrote what seems to be Suzuki’s version of the story. Read More >
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