Toyota 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.
Looking at the supply chain and transit times, it was easy to predict that the big American knock-on effect of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami would start to happen around – right now. To nobody’s surprise, The Nikkei [sub] writes this Tuesday morning in Tokyo that Toyota “is highly likely to halt all manufacturing operations at its factories in North America later this month due to parts supply disruptions.” It goes on to say that “the scale and the duration of the expected shutdown have yet to be decided, but all of Toyota’s 14 factories in North America could be affected.”
I could write that and finally go to bed, but my mother had told me to believe nobody. Not even a respected newswire that gave its name to the main Japanese stock index? Not even that. An early call to Toyota HQ reaches spokesman Dion Corbett, who has a completely different story. Read More >
I wasn’t planning to review the Chrysler 200. Renaming a lightly revised car to escape a well-deserved bad reputation always strikes me as a lame tactic. And the Sebring, on which the 200 is based, was so far off in so many ways that I didn’t see the point. We don’t just review cars to trash them around here. But then I drove the revised minivan, and was very pleasantly surprised. Perhaps Chrysler had similarly transformed the Sebring when creating the 200? With a Buick Regal for the week, and a need for some reference points, the time had come to find out.
The Japanese tsunami impacts everything, from cars to toilet paper. Most Japanese car makers were closed since after the catastrophe and will remain closed at least until mid April. Many paper mills are in the affected area, and all paper, from glossy stock to the softer kind, is in short supply. Publishers of Japanese illustrated pulp fiction have canceled the printed version and direct their readers to the Internet instead. Tokyo corporations battle a wave of toilet rolls vanishing from their restrooms, from where they find a way to the toire at home. While these may be temporary outages, the lack of stable electrical power emerges more and more as the biggest impediment to the recovery of the Japanese industry. It will affect you and your car, in one way or the other. Read More >
After Yemen last weekend, it is now Official Sales Data Week, where we explore a country that has the great idea to give us access to actual sales data, and therefore saves me from looking on YouTube for hours on end in the hope of figuring out a rough sales ranking…
This week we are going to freezing Russia to find out whether Lada models still have the stranglehold over the market they enjoyed in the time of the USSR.
Now if Russian cars scare you (yes, they do that to some people, especially those who saw the Moscow car chase in The Bourne Supremacy) but you are keen to find out which cars are the best sellers in 153 other countries around the planet, simply go here. It’s my blog and comrade, I swear you will love it. Read More >
In the (OMG) 7 years I have lived and worked in China by now, I have learned not to take the first two months of the year all too seriously. After all, according to the Chinese calendar, the first two months mostly belong to the old year. Chinese New Year is some time in late January or early February, depending on the inscrutable lunar calendar. The nearly month long festivities mess up sales, and make comparisons pretty much useless. Confucius say: “Only the stupidest of men make predictions based on January sales.”
March is a different matter. It’s the first “regular” month of the new year. Everybody is waiting for March sales results in China. We’ll have to wait at least a week or so until the CAAM is done tabulating the sales of the 60 to 120 automakers in China (even that number remains shrouded in mystery.) But there is our trusted indicator: GM China. Read More >
Doesn’t anybody read the Detroit News? I can think of 6,750 people who don’t. They are the people, rental agencies, or hopeless confused aliens trying, albeit incompetently, to fit into human society who took home a new Chrysler 200 in March. This kind of volume won’t worry Toyota, but a full year of this volume would pay back the likely development costs for the car and then some.
This 200-centric news is part of a pretty solid month for Chrysler overall. The platform mate Avenger rang the register for 5,954 units, while the brand as a whole sold over 121,000 cars and trucks. The full press release is here, but no matter how you look at it, this is good news for the Mopar crew. Let’s see what a few months of restricted Accord and Camry production does for them…
Toyota reports [PDF] that it has increased its MSRPs by an average of 1.7%, as the automaker seeks to regain control over pricing which has taken a hit in the year since its recall scandal. Of course, the fact that the firm’s supply of vehicles is likely to be limited by the chaotic aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was causing its transaction prices to rise anyway, but Toyota tells Automobile magazine that the MSRP increase
has no relation to any production shut downs or shortages stemming from the recent disaster in Japan
As we had warned a few days ago, the Japanese car market took a punishing hit in March. Sales of new cars, trucks and buses dropped 37 percent from a year earlier, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association reports. Separately reported minivehicles took a similar hit and dropped 31.6 percent, according to data by the Japan Mini Vehicles Association, published in The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >
In the usual show of unity, all three Japanese majors will have at least some production up by mid April. Honda told The Nikkei [sub] today that it will resume auto assembly at its two domestic production plants in Saitama Prefecture, near Tokyo, and Mie Prefecture, western Japan, from April 11. Read More >
The Nikkei must have had too much sake at Yokohama’s famous seaside watering holes after they finished an interview with Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn yesterday evening. Their reports of an imminent merger of the two (and sundry others) under a joint holding company turn out to be utter nonsense, or rather “a misinterpretation of a wide-ranging interview,“ as Rachel Konrad, Director of Communications of the Renault Nissan Alliance, tells us in more elegant words. Read More >
Often considered, more than often denied, now it’s on the table again: Nissan and Renault, having lived in an open relationship with a joint CEO since 1999, could move under the umbrella of a common holding company. Joint CEO Carlos Ghosn told that to The Nikkei [sub] late Wednesday night in Yokohama. The managements of Nissan and Renault seem convinced that this is the way to go. However, there is a lot of work to be done before the wedding will become official. Read More >
Howdy Sajeev. I’m looking to the general crowd of enthusiasts and experts here to give me some advice. I am most assuredly not a car expert myself.
We have three cars, two of which are a 2000 Toyota Camry (177k miles) and a 2000 Chevy Blazer (78k miles). The Camry is my daily car, and I drive 55 miles round trip to work five days a week (sometimes more as I have night school twice a week). The Blazer is my mother-in-law’s car, and she drives very little, mainly just to pick up my daughter from school a couple of times a week (less than 10 miles round trip), down to the local shops, etc. We are up in the PA/NJ area.
Our (not quite) daily run-down of delays, shut-downs, shortages, and postponements, triggered by the March 11 tsunami in Japan.
Toyota will have lost production of 200,000 vehicles by Friday. The Nikkei [sub]
Toyota says that 300 dealerships out of a total of 810 in North Japan have been damaged by the earthquake. The Nikkei [sub]
Nissan figures its Chinese output will be about 10 lower than planned in April as supply chain disruptions hinder operations. The Dongfeng Nissan joint venture will idle plants on weekends until mid-April, but will continue doing overtime on weekdays. Dongfeng Nissan has trouble getting parts from Hitachi. The Nikkei [sub] Read More >
Last weekend, Akio Toyoda donned heavy work clothes and a hard hat to do some genchi genbutsu (Toyota-speak for “go and see for yourself”) and toured the areas hit by earthquake and tsunami. Instead of us writing about it, we let Toyoda go and write himself.
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