How could the whole Toyota iQ-rebadging situation get any more embarrassing for Aston-Martin? The answer is staring you in the face. The Aston Cygnet is rapidly becoming one for the history books [via Autocar.co.uk]

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda is a regular Japanese guy: Shy in public, but blogging on his computer every day. Using the handle “Morizou,” he blogs about his love for sports cars and auto racing on Gazoo.com, which he founded in 1998, if Todayonline has it right. Akio Toyoda is also an avid racer. His  appearances at the 24 Hours Nürburgring endurance race in a Lexus LFA are legend. He is chickening out! Read More >

All eyes are on Harrison, NY, today. Technicians from Toyota and NHTSA will head to the NYC burbs and pour over a 2005 Toyota Prius that crashed into a stone wall in the tony bedroom town of Harrison. Its driver claimed the hybrid had sped up on its own. Toyota will read out the data recorded in the Prius computer. According to the Associated Press, Toyota techs will “use equipment to determine how many times the driver hit the brakes and gas. It used the same tools earlier this week to cast doubt on a California driver who claimed his Prius sped to 94 mph before a patrol officer helped him stop it.” Read More >

Time to break out the (tasteful) shibari pictures. “Nissan would seriously consider joining a comprehensive tie-up between Renault S.A. and Daimler AG if the alliance they are discussing happens,” says The Nikkei [sub]. With Renault and Nissan tied-up both at the hips and on top, such a move would make more than just sense. Read More >

How about 7 minutes and 48 seconds worth of Nissan Juke B-rolls? That this car exists isn’t puzzling: Europe is forever producing bizarre little segment-busters that look like they were styled by an eldritch abomination. What boggles the mind is that Nissan is going to try to sell this Versa-based “crossunder” in the US. Stare at the footage for a bit and try to imagine what business in your community you could see one of these in front of, and you’ll see what we’re on about. [Warning: more than 3 minutes of uninterrupted viewing could cause complete loss of sanity and/or a new appreciation for Toyota-bland styling]

The biggest storyline right now for America’s bailed-out automakers is how little they’ve been able to capitalize on Toyota’s stumbles. While Ford and Hyundai made hefty sales gains last month, both GM and Chrysler’s performances were distinctly unimproved by Toyota’s woes. And now that Toyota is launching major incentive packages to recover lost sales momentum, Detroit has no remaining incentive to not revert to the bad old practices of incentive dependence. With GM and Ford diving into the zero-percent war, Global Insight’s George Magliano tells Automotive News [sub]:

Incentives are going to be here into the third quarter. We’re not going to wean consumers off incentives any time soon. We’re stuck with it. They’re all jockeying for position… After clunkers everybody backed off incentives. Now they’re going to the whip again

From Jim Sikes (he only wants a new car), and Orange County ( no idea what they really want), to class action lawyers (they want billions), everybody wants to cash in on Toyota. Chinese Zhejiang Province’s doesn’t want to stand behind. Their commerce bureau and consumer protection committee called on Toyota to compensate drivers for costs stemming from its recall of faulty vehicles, reports The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >

European new car sales have fallen back to crisis levels. With many of the incentive programs withdrawn or phasing out, it’s back to reality. Reality is quite rough. Basically, Europe is back where it was in the carmageddon days of early 2009. The few bright spots are caused by on-going life support measures. Without government generosity, the European market place would be a wasteland.

New passenger car registrations in the EU increased by a mere 3 percent in February. Compared to the pre-crisis levels of February 2008, new car registrations decreased by 16 percent, reports the European Automobile Manufacturers Association ACEA. Read More >

Just as Toyota has coasted in recent years on a reputation built some time ago, Audi’s latest round of interior-cheapening has gone largely unremarked-upon in the motoring press. Sitting in the new A4, I don’t find myself thinking, as Motor Trend did, that its “high-quality materials and clean, attractive design continue to live up to Audi’s stellar reputation as the industry benchmark.” In fact, the interiors of nearly every current Audi (except the A8 and TT) strike me as cheap, disappointing and monumentally uninspired. In other words, the opposite of living up to Audi’s reputation.

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China has become a world automobile producing and consuming power, but it should also be noted that the industry still lacks core technology and has weak innovative capabilities… This creates hidden dangers for public safety

The closest thing Toyota has given to an explicit accounting of its unintended acceleration woes is the admission that rapid growth detracted from the company’s previously unquestioned commitment to quality. With the Chinese auto market growing even faster than Toyota was, the Chinese Central government is anxious to prevent such nasty side-effects of rapid volume growth from manifesting themselves in the domestic auto industry. And well it should be: with Chinese automakers like BYD poised to launch overseas sales campaigns, the Chinese auto industry is at a crucial stage in developing its international image. China’s Ministry of Information and Technology has released a statement [via DetNews] urging its domestic automakers to heed Toyota’s example, and adopt “new technology, new techniques, new equipment and new materials” to master the balance between profit and quality. And hopefully move past the image of hand-assembled batteries and carbon-copy design while they’re at it. Meanwhile, Toyota is feeling the hurt. Stung by calls by the government to compensate Chinese drivers, Toyota-FAW fell from China’s top ten sales list. Toyota China reported a 30 percent rise in sales in February, but at 45,400 units the firm was still way down from its 72,000 unit January performance.

Jim Sikes’ Prius high-speed dash to fame or infamy is a media hype-fest, with wild swings in sentiment from Toyota bashing to Sikes trashing. The rush to judgment is innately human, and Sikes certainly makes an easy target. But in the process, very little effort has been made to analyze what actually happened, or what might have actually happened, on the basis of the facts rather than Jim Sikes’ financial history and sexual proclivities. Read More >

That Bible of the intelligencia, Consumer Reports, has released its 2010 Annual Auto Issue, and once again, denizens of Cambridge, Austin, Berkeley, Eugene, and their sister university towns all over the land are parsing its pages, seeking cars that will maximize their utility. Or maybe I’m projecting. Anyway, with apologies to Michael Karesh and True Delta, here’s a summary of the work of the wonks from Yonkers and East Haddam.
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The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, piggy-backing on analysis started by Overlawyered’s Ted Frank, tracked down all the available ages of reported incidents of unintended acceleration in Toyotas and graphed them. The results speak volumes, as does Frank’s assessment that:

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them. (If computers are going to discriminate against anyone, they should be picking on the young, who are more likely to take up arms against the rise of the machines and future Terminators).

McArdle’s graph of incidents by location (parking, freeway, etc) after the jump.
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Toyota sales back home in Japan have yet to show a sign of suffering (they were up 49.9 percent in February while the Japanese market rose 35.1 percent.) However, Toyota’s reputation is taking a hit in the Land of the Rising Sun, says The Nikkei [sub].  Depends on how you look at it: 40 percent of Japanese consumers in a recent survey said Toyota’s troubles have undermined their confidence. 58.4 percent said the issues have not changed their opinion of Toyota, 1.4 percent said they now hold the firm in higher regard. Read More >