If you only get excited by the sausage of a car and not by the sausage making of a car factory, hop on to the next article, because this will utterly bore you. Everybody gone? Alright, talking to myself again. We’ve always said, not really in jest, that two industries profit the most from just in time manufacturing: The real estate industry and the trucking industry. Honda wants some of that money. (Read More…)
Today, I saw a new, and so far the finest specimen of Japan’s new export products: A car factory. Remember when the Nikkei wrote about a new Toyota factory in the Miyagi Prefecture with a U-shaped assembly line where the assembly time is cut down to a third? Not only did they get it wrong. They missed the best part of the story: Budget car factories, ready for export. Of course, that’s not how it was sold to the natives.
Ohira is a little village near Sendai. Sendai is a town two Shinkansen hours north of Tokyo. The area is famous for its beef tongue, not the hottest export item. Ohira was known for exactly nothing until Toyota decided in 2007 to relocate their factory from Sagamihara, in the outskirts of Tokyo, up into the woods of Ohira.
A year later, the whole region went into shock: (Read More…)
American car ads of the early 1980s came up short in several departments: Burning rubber, jet-engine-grade turbocharger sound, and blatantly sped-up film that made the cars appear to be going 300 MPH. Oh, and they also lacked James Bond! (Read More…)
The attentive reader of TTAC is not surprised by the news provided by Automobilwoche [sub] that Toyota will introduce a plug-in version of its iQ by 2012. It had been on Toyota’s green roadmap for months. The (not really) surprising news is: You won’t be able to buy the EV iQ when it gets launched. (Read More…)
Sure, Internet video is mostly about dental-fetish porn (particularly the very stimulating “spit sink” subgenre), but when the novocaine wears off and the last vinyl-clad hygienist has put aside her last stainless-steel scraper, you’re ready to explore the other great thing about Internet video… old television ads for the Citroën AX. (Read More…)
While Mazda is still talking with Russian politicos about producing cars in Siberia, Toyota is doing it. Toyota “is moving into the Russian Far East ahead of other Japanese automakers as part of a high-priority effort to tap emerging markets,” at least as far as The Nikkei [sub] is concerned. (Read More…)
After tarring and feathering Toyota for alleged sudden unintended acceleration, after inventing a mass murder of 89 that creates a massive 261,000 hits on Google, after dragging executives in front of tribunals of the Washington Inquisition, after shaking down Toyota for unprecedented $48.8 million in fines, after NASA engineers subjected Toyota cars to torture worse than waterboarding, the NHTSA today announced that they found … (Read More…)
Toyota’s Senior Managing Director Takahiko Ijichi had a surprise for the press that congregated today in the windowless basement conference room of Toyota’s downtown Tokyo office. They were invited to hear the results of the 9 month period from April to December. The scribes had prepared for the worst. As the numbers were released, some furiously begun retyping the prepared stories in which they had planned to insert the expected bad numbers before hitting SEND. Instead, Reuters reports: “The world’s top automaker posted a smaller-than-expected fall in third quarter profits and hiked its sales forecast for the year to March 31 by 70,000 vehicles to 7.48 million, thanks to better than expected sales in Asia, Japan and Russia.” (Read More…)
More than three years ago, on New Year’s Eve of 2007, our Beloved Leader, the dearly departed Robert Farago rattled the Best and Brightest with one of his thought (and sometimes aggression) provoking questions. This time, it was: “What’s the plural of Prius?”
Damned if I know, but a few days ago, the TTAC server reported repeated search terms for the very same “What’s the plural of Prius?” I decided to do my journalistic duty and investigate. The results were shocking. (Read More…)
We had intimated it a few days ago, now it’s official: Toyota’s Prius is no longer primus (or make that ichi ban) in Japan. The hybrid that had been Japan’s best selling car for 20 months in a row had to relinquish the throne to Honda’s Fit. (Read More…)
Japan has – as the confused reader of our monthly sales report from the Land of Nippon is woefully aware of – a two class car system. There are cars, and there are kei cars. Soon, there will be a three class system. (Read More…)
Japanese domestic new car sales (excluding minivehicles) have been down 21.5 percent in January, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association told The Nikkei [sub]. 187,154 new cars changed hands. This does not surprise anybody in Japan. Some even see a silver lining. (Read More…)
Yesterday, I changed my base of operations to Tokyo for a month to escape the Chinese New Year festivities (i.e. one month of WW III worthy fireworks, combined with closed shops and restaurants.) If I would have stuck it out a few days longer, I could have enjoyed a ride in a fuel cell vehicle. (Read More…)
With worrying news breaking recently about Nissan’s slow rollout of its Leaf EV, Toshiharu Sakai, a senior VP at the Japanese automaker reassures the Nikkei that
We initially planned to produce 10,000 this fiscal year, and we can meet (this target) by the end of March.
Sakai insists that the Leaf’s production has not been interrupted, and that the Oppama plant would produce 3,000 units in February before ramping up to its capacity production of about 4,000 units by March. Leaf production at Nissan’s Smyrna, TN plant will begin late next year, and will produce as many as 150k units per year (and 200k battery packs per year), while Nissan’s Sunderland, UK plant will be producing another 50k Leafs and 60k battery packs annually starting in 2013. All told, Nissan will have about 250k units of Leaf production when the Sunderland plant reaches full volume, which puts it on track to a commanding lead in global EV production… now it just needs the market to start demanding that many cars. Meanwhile, a minor issue with the Leaf’s ownership experience has raised its head and deserves a little attention.
Mazda has so far been, well, reluctant when it came to newfangled powertrains. Now they can’t help it any longer and announce their intention to jump on the electric train. Mazda announced today that it is working on a plug-in. It is an electrified version of what Mazda sells as the Demio in Japan, or as the Mazda2 in most other markets. The pluggable Mazda will be available in spring of 2012. In a way. (Read More…)
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