When people talk about red hot car markets, the usually mean BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Nobody ever mentions Indonesia. Indonesia? That island nation has some 235m people, three quarters the population of the U.S.A. But it’s very under-motorized. Last year, Indonesians bought only 486,000 cars, 20 percent less than in the year before. Indonesia’s car production is not much to write home about either. According to OICA, Indonesia produced 464,816 motor vehicles last year. In 2005, they made 500,710. So let’s forget about them, right? Not so fast. (Read More…)
Despite government witch hunts (recently cancelled, supposedly) and subsidized competitors, Toyota is holding its own. Just. But like Toyota said, they’re going on the offensive. They’ve upped the incentives (but are still below industry average) and launching new warranties to confirm their commitment to their products. But they’re also pushing into new markets to offset their reliance on the North American market (and also to make more money). Now one of those markets is India. The formula is very simple there. Cheap, reliable, safe, and cheap. And that’s what Toyota is trying to do. About time. Suzuki is eating everybody’s lunch in India.(Read More…)
Everybody, please help me out here and look out of the window: Is the sun rising in the west? No? Are clocks running backwards? No? Then WTH is going on? NHTSA Chief David Strickland praised, yes praised automakers for their dispatch on recalls, and wait until you hear this: Strickland gave a gold star to Toyota for its improvements. (Read More…)
Welcome to Tinfoil Time. A public service for paranoids and their enemies. When the NHTSA went after Toyota for their runaway cars, some people (me, included) saw this as a transparent attempt to undermine Toyota in order to make GM and Chrysler (A.K.A new arms of the US government) more attractive both in terms of purchasing their products and the IPO’s. But now that the circus is leaving town, is the NHTSA looking for a new victim? Whilst searching the net, I saw (part of) an article (sub) which mentions how Ford’s North American market share is on the rise. Sure, Toyota’s market share in the U.S. dropped by 1.5 percent compared to September 2009. But GM did not pick up those sales. They lost 2.8 percent. The winners were Ford (+ 1.4 percent), and Chrysler (+2.1 percent).I also remember a poll that was taken which claimed that how 54 percent of people were less likely to buy a GM car because of their bailout. Rising sales at Ford and bad will towards GM? I’ve seen this scenario before! The next stage is now the NHTSA will tell us to stop driving our Fords. Trouble is, Ford doesn’t have any recalls of recent. So what can the NHTSA do? You recycle a recall. (Read More…)
Toyota, king of the hybrids, won’t sell their first plug-in hybrid before 2012. But they already have their kind of a perception gap. The car will be able to go 23km (14.29 miles) on battery alone, then, the ICE engine will kick in and start making electricity. However, research shows that only a few people know about the electric-only feature. Or do they care at all? (Read More…)
A few days ago I wrote about Ralph Nader asking Toyota to break down their somewhat suspect figure of “$1,000,000 every hour” on safety. Well, quite surprisingly, Toyota answered back. (Read More…)
For a while, TTAC has been tracking a strange story: Instead of exporting cars, Japanese carmakers (or should we call them factorymakers?) increasingly resort to exporting car factories. The higher and higher yen makes exports prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, a higher and higher yen buys more and more production capacity abroad. From Nissan to Mitsubishi, there is a chorus that sings the song that suddenly, people in low wage countries can make high quality cars. Now nobody would assume that Japanese carmakers plan a wholesale desertion of the land of Nippon, right? Wrong.
Today, we find an odd statement in The Nikkei [sub]: Toyota denies that they will leave Japan. At least not now … (Read More…)
Aston Martin’s decision to sell a worked-over Toyota iQ has raised some serious questions for “brand values” advocates across the internet of late. Does an aristocratic sportscar brand need to take on the problems of urban congestion and carbon intensity? Does the Cygnet’s noblesse oblige PR value outweigh the furor of countless Aston Martin aspirants at the thought of their beloved brand becoming a glorified Toyota tuner house? The answer to both of these questions is apparently yes… (Read More…)
Toyota has been taken to task quite a few times over the past few months. But now it’s time for Ralph Nader to take his pot shot at them. Why so late?
Ralph Nader is no stranger to calling car companies out on their safety. He took GM to task over the safety of the Corvair. Claims which the NHTSA and Texas A&M University studied and dismissed, but were backed up by John DeLorean. But now Mr Nader has Toyota in his crosshairs. (Read More…)
That doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. The Mazda 5 is six inches longer than the Prius: check. The 5 also stands six inches taller than the Prius; does this? Toyota has said that interior room is 50% larger, so that looks about right. No word on third row seating; I’m guessing at least kiddie seats back there.
Power train? Almost undoubtedly, the bigger 2.4 L HSD version as used in the Camry hybrid and Lexus 250h. Mileage? If the first number isn’t a 4, don’t bother. I know one thing: this will sell in places like Oregon, either replacing Subaru wagons, and/or giving Prius families’ kids some growing room.
After ruling the American roads for most of the 1990s and 2000s, the conventional midsize SUV has rapidly become an endangered species. GM, Ford, and others have abandoned the segment entirely. The Grand Cherokee, from its inception intended for more of an on-road role than other Jeeps, has become ever more refined and luxurious in a bid to survive. Nissan still offers the Pathfinder, but will it still be a conventional SUV if and when it’s redesigned? The Borrego? A mistake Kia won’t be making a second time. Only one company has had the guts and/or cluelessness to recently redesign a midsize SUV that is first and foremost an SUV. Could the 2010 Toyota 4Runner be the last of its kind? (Read More…)
A couple of days ago I wrote about how Peugeot is looking to South East Asia for the next area of big growth. I also mentioned in the article how Peugeot will have a tough time trying to crack that market. Toyota, Honda and Nissan already have a pretty tight grip on that area. Well, it appears that Toyota has put forward their first defensive stroke. (Read More…)
From conflict-torn Afghanistan [via Newsweek] comes this strange tale of Taliban tribute to the “the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47”: the Toyota Hilux (more famous among Western car nuts for its infamous Top Gear adventures).
As the war in Afghanistan escalated several years ago, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, a member of the team that designed the Iraq surge for Gen. David Petraeus, began to notice a new tattoo on some insurgent Afghan fighters. It wasn’t a Taliban tattoo. It wasn’t even Afghan. It was a Canadian maple leaf.
When a perplexed Kilcullen began to investigate, he says, he discovered that the incongruous flags were linked to what he says is one of the most important, and unnoticed, weapons of guerrilla war in Afghanistan and across the world: the lightweight, virtually indestructible Toyota Hilux truck.
A report in Japan’s Kyodo news agency [via Reuters/Automotive News [sub]] must have raised a few eyebrows in Japan: thanks to a rising Yen, Toyota is reportedly eying an end to Corolla exports from Japan by 2013. Toyota has since emphasized that
it has made no decision to halt production in Japan of its Corolla automobiles for overseas sales but said it was always considering an optimum global production structure.
The yen hit 81 to the dollar today, both on Yen strength and dollar weakness. ( A Euro buys 1.41 dollars again – get ready for Eurotrash invading Manhattan.)
Toyota has already shifted the bulk of its Corolla production overseas: last year it built 815k Corollas outside of Japan, and only 235k in its home country (60 percent of which were exported). Still, Toyota has long considered stability in its Japanese workforce as core institutional value, and previous currency rises led to changes in design and quality philosophy rather than reductions in Japanese production levels. But then Toyota is no longer in a position to release currency pressure by targeting “fat” or “overquality” product the way it could in the early 90s. The “overquality” simply isn’t there anymore. Like everyone else, Toyota’s major competitive option is to move production closer to cheap labor and large markets.
Given the controversy of the Volt (earned or not), GM is being closely watched from all angles. Some people think that GM hasn’t changed. Others think that this may delay GM’s IPO. But, ironically what hasn’t changed, despite the witch-hunt of GM’s owners, is Toyota’s unwavering support of GM. (Read More…)
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