Unless a major disaster happens, (such as a falling sky, or a combined blood, fish, frog, and snake rain) Ford will retake the #2 slot from Toyota this year in  the U.S. The DetN came to this conclusion after studying the year to date market share of both. In his monthly sales call, Ford’s analyst George Pipas said that Ford has increased its domestic sales at nearly twice the market’s growth rate. Ford’s market share stands at 16.4 percent at the moment, up from 15.3 percent last year.  And Toyota? (Read More…)

“The next 24 months will be tough for us,” said Soh Weiming, Volkswagen’s company’s executive president for China, to Bloomberg. Is Volkswagen running scared in China? Will the bubble finally burst? Soh Weiming is worried. (Read More…)

Thought the Toyota brand had been dealt the death blow during the recall crisis? That brand seems to be more resilient than imagined: The latest Kelley Blue Book Brand Watch study has Toyota on top “as the most-considered auto brand among new-car shoppers.” That according to a press release just released by KBB. (Read More…)

Tesla sometimes has been mocked as a bunch of hackers that simply wire-up a load of laptop batteries, whereas other serious and professional carmakers are looking into serious and professional batteries to power their future EVs. If egmcartech is not mistaken, then some of the serious and professional carmakers just had a sudden change of heart. (Read More…)

Toyota looks very cautiously into the future. This is the bottom line of an article that just appeared in the Asahi Shimbun (in Japanese. You just have to trust me, or rather Frau Schmitto-san, who provided the translation.) According to the piece, Toyota downrevised its projection for the 2011 fiscal year (starting April 1 2011) to 7.8 million for Toyota alone, excluding Daihatsu and Hino. With those two backed in, total worldwide production of TMC would be around 8.8 million. Meaning: Until further notice, Toyota’s world is pretty much flat. (Read More…)

“Toyota is in trouble. The Japanese automaker is playing defense as sales slump, dealer inventories swell — even for the Camry and Prius — and consumers demand larger discounts to remain loyal to the brand once viewed as unstoppable,” so beginneth a lengthy article in Detroit’s Freep that reads like a swansong for a formerly mighty ToMoCo. First, the requisite recitation of the ode to the obvious: (Read More…)

Good news, bad news times at Toyota. First, the bad news. (Read More…)

Both Toyota and the remains of its joint venture known as NUMMI have sued the remains of “Old GM” for breach of contract according to two separate reports in the Wall Street Journal [sub]. NUMMI is seeking $365m, claiming GM caused the collapse of the joint venture by unilaterally pulling out as it collapsed into bankruptcy,  sticking Toyota and NUMMI with the bill.

Those decisions breached … commitments to Nummi and sounded its death knell,” said the lawsuit, filed last week. And unlike Toyota, GM’s bankruptcy estate “has refused to contribute to Nummi’s deficit during the wind down”

Toyota, meanwhile, is suing for some $73m in development costs for the Pontiac Vibe, a vehicle that GM was supposed to sell for another two years.

(Read More…)

Remember the just-released Toyota Ractis? It’s just dropped in Subaru form, giving the Japanese market the tantalizing choice of two distinct brands for an identical four-door subcompact hatch. Moreover, the Trezia marks a changing of the guard at Subaru: whereas Subaru used to develop and sell a wacky rainbow of subcompact and “kei” cars and trucks (some of which are still visible at Subaru’s Japanese website), all future Subarus smaller than the Impreza will be rebadged Toyotas. This change won’t materially affect the US market, but it can’t help but erode Subaru’s image as an independent small maker of quirky cars. Apparently there is just no place for that kind of automaker in the future… the revolution will be rebadged.

There is no “all clear” at Toyota. The company is still “on a crisis footing a year after the first of a wave of recalls of more than 12m vehicles.” This is the bottom line of an article the Financial Time wrote after talking to Shinichi Sasaki, the board member responsible for quality at Toyota. What is even more interesting: The article was put on The Nikkei [sub] newswire, which brought it to worldwide attention.

Sasaki makes some alarming statements: (Read More…)

When Autoweek asks the R&D boss at an alt-drivetrain leader like Toyota what the future of its powertrain development looks like, one tends to hope for something revelatory in his answer. Instead, we get

Hyundai could have timed this announcement a bit better. Wouldn’t the following announcement have been a fine crowning of  TTAC’s Korea week? Instead, the week ended unceremoniously with a reflection on thee shitboxes. From shitbox to market leader: Hyundai has kicked Toyota from the pedestal as the largest Asian carmaker in Europe. In a way. (Read More…)

Having ignored the first wave of EV enthusiasm, Toyota turned to Tesla in the aftermath of its recall scandal as an investment that could potentially catch it up with other EV makers, and possibly help its battered image along the way. Officially, the deal was brokered after Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda drove the Tesla Roadster, and came away impressed with its “splendid flavor.” Toyota then dropped $50m on Tesla’s stock and another $60m on the Tesla-developed RAV4 EV prototype, raising the possibility of re-starting production at the NUMMI plant, which Tesla bought from Toyota as part of the hookup. But with Toyota also developing an EV city car in-house and talking up the return of hydrogen cars, Tesla’s role in Toyota’s future is clear as mud. If the RAV4 EV makes financial sense, Tesla could contract-build them at NUMMI, adding much-needed volume to a giant factory that would otherwise be building only the Model S (at a rate of about 20k per year).  But there’s the rub: Tesla clearly needs Toyota more than the other way around; it needs Toyota’s volume, manufacturing expertise and legitimacy. But what will Toyota get out of the relationship? An expensive EV compact crossover? Goodwill from the American people? The ability to keep in-house development looking past a short-term fad for EVs?

So here’s today’s puzzle: if you were Akio Toyoda, would you A) double down on Tesla, and buy a controlling share or even roll it into the parent company, B) quietly sell the stake and move on, or C) keep Tesla around as a speculative EV offshoot of the main company? It’s a complex question, and answers should touch on the market potential of EVs, Tesla’s strategy and viability, Toyota’s relationship with EVs, the PR benefits of keeping an American EV startup alive, and much, much more. Enjoy!

We’ve called Toyota’s Tesla-developed RAV4 EV an “EV insurance policy,” but it seems that Toyota is even hedging its hedges. Automotive News [sub] reports that the Japanese automaker is developing an EV version of its iQ city car in-house, the first in-house EV developed by Toyota for the mass market. If Toyota’s experiment with Tesla fails the way Tesla’s development partnership for the Smart EV with Daimler did, Toyota will be ready with an in-house developed EV. The iQ EV should have a 65 mile range when market-ready, but no date has been given for its launch. Though offering less range than the RAV4 EV, the iQ EV should be considerably cheaper for Toyota to produce… and it keeps the automaker’s engineers in the EV game. As Toyota moves towards a 2015 hydrogen car, it’s plugging EVs into the city car profile where they should remain competitive long-term. This seems to be the model for the future: EVs for short-range city commuting, hydrogen for longer distances, and continuously-improved gasoline cars for those who can’t afford either. The broad-based green car portfolio seems to be the way of the future.

As Bertel reported this morning, the debut of Toyota’s first potential mass-market pure EV has not been an occasion for the Japanese automaker to trumpet battery-electric technology as a world-beater. In fact, given the kind of rhetoric that usually accompanies concepts like this Tesla-developed electric RAV4, Toyota is still treating electric vehicles as a limited, and relatively short-term trend that poses little threat to the gas-based core of its business. And there’s strong evidence that this is the right approach. Hybrids are the mass-market face of green motoring in the here-and-now, and a wave of hydrogen vehicles scheduled for 2015 could take considerable wind out of the EV bandwagon’s sales long-term. No wonder Toyota shoved development of the RAV4 EV to its idealistic “investment,” Tesla. This car is not the future… it’s an insurance policy.