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Lexus was 3rd.
Interestingly, it's BMW first time at the top. Cadillac dominated until 1997, then Lincoln in 1998 (really?), M-B in 1999, and Lexus for the past 11 years.
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120105/RETAIL/120109953/128- 6
It wasn't a cheap fight, but they have deep pockets:
Mercedes increased incentive spending in November by 39 percent compared with a year earlier, and BMW's incentives rose 25 percent
From a GM rep:
"They've been outspending us -- even with some relatively newer products," Kurt McNeil, Cadillac's vice president of sales, said in a telephone interview. BMW has offered $400 to $600 a car more than the General Motors brand, he said, and Mercedes' discounts exceeded Cadillac's by more than $1,000. "They've been bringing it from an incentive standpoint," he said.
So Hitler should not feel too bad about himself; he was beaten by the cold winter in Russia, not the Red Army...
Hard to build cars under water and with no power.
I don't think so.
The mother nature played major roll in both Germany's lost in the east front and the Toyota's lost last year.
But was the mother nature the only factor to blame? No.
Could the lost have been minimized or reverted by better human decisions? Absolutely, in both cases.
Had Hitler realistically assessed the Red Army's resilience and adopted a more achievable war plan, they might have won the war.
Had Toyota realistically assessed the earthquake risk in Japan and adopted more diversified manufacturing bases, the quake damage at one single point would have been minimized.
Noone saw that coming, though. It's not Cali.
Plus, they already have been diversifying production. How do you think the Camry outsold the Malibu by more than 100,000 units?
The strong Yen have forced them to diversify, and that's how 6 months after a major natural disaster, their sales were up. Already. Stunning.
The quake after effects are felt for a long time afterward because the nuclear power plants were affected. They even shifted production to weekends to ease the burden on the grid.
Japan was very resilient, actually. Look at this before/after photo:
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/24/japanese-repair-quake-ravaged-road-in-just-si- x-days/
I don't think they are back to 100% strength, but they're close enough that US sales have grown for the past 2 months, and that's comparing pre-tsunami sales levels.
Heck, December 2010 they piled on the incentives. To have increased sales 0.4% compared to that was rather incredible.
I'm not sure "noone" means you or Toyota. Japan has more earthquakes than California.
How can this not be in Toyota's planning?
Per scienceray.com "The quake also shifted the whole earth's axis by 7 inches".
According to dailymail.co.uk, "Parts of Japan's coastline shifted 2.4metres".
Nothing even close to this scale had ever happened before. Everyone was shocked.
I challenge you - show me where you predicted this before it happened.
{crickets chirping}
Yeah, thought so.
Also, the Hitler reference is absurd - his army did not recover after 6 months. It's not like Toyota died a fiery death. Market share bounced back to 13.9% in November and 14.3% in December, as supply recovered.
Now *that* someone did actually predict in advance. Me. :shades:
http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/06/toyota-unveils-updated-2013-land-cruiser/
No one need to predict it; it's a way of life in Japan. There have been 24 earthquakes with magnitude 6.6 or greater in the past 20 years and 18 of them before the 3/11/11 quake. If you did not know it, that's fine. If Toyota management did not know it, then it would be too stupid.
Here's the list:
Date, magnitude
1/1/12, 6.8
7/10/11, 7.0
4/11/11, 6.6
4/7/11, 7.1
3/11/11, 7.1
3/11/11, 9.0
---------------------------------
3/9/11, 7.2
12/21/10, 7.4
2/26/10, 7.0
8/11/09, 6.6
8/9/09, 7.1
6/14/08, 6.9
7/16/07, 6.6
3/25/07, 6.9
1/13/07, 8.1
11/15/06, 8.3
8/16/05, 7.2
3/20/05, 7.0
10/23/04, 6.9
9/25/03, 8.3
5/4/98, 7.5
1/17/95, 7.2
12/28/94, 7.7
7/12/93, 7.7
If anything it just does to show the Richter scale alone does not convey the level of impact of a given natural disaster. It was the tsunami that followed, not the quake itself, that caused most of the damage.
Does a man have to learn that a gun can kill by pulling the trigger to his head?
The 1/17/95 quake in Japan alone killed 6,434 (40% of the toll of last year); the 3/25/07, 1/13/07, 11/15/06, 8/16/05 quakes in Japan all created tsunami. It would be a fool not to learn from them.
It's also how the Corolla won for small cars. Also how the Sienna won the minivan category.
They have indeed hedged their bets. That is how they won those 3 important titles.
So you agree that mother nature is not everything....
Like I said before, Toyota won some battles but lost the war to GM.
Toyota lost the battle in 2011 due to not one but two natural disasters (Thai floods also).
The war in on-going and unlike Hitler, they're recovering very quickly.
Please click the 1st post of this thread; it was on 12/5/2005. Toyota's decline started then and mushroomed into a 20 million recalls. That was all BEFORE the quake and flood.
Shoot, imagine what this drivetrain would do in a small coupe like a front drive FR-S.
If we look way back:
URL if you cannot see the graph above:
http://i.cnn.net/money/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/03/19/8402324/toyo- ta_share.gif
We see that the current 14% or so market share maintains the majority of the strong growth they had. It was more like 8-9% for a very long time.
Amazing recovery, really.
So, is GM back to the 45% glory days? LOL
Look at Eclipse sales. For a while they sold a ton, but if you graphed sales over time it pretty much takes a nose dive. I can't even tell you if they are still sold new.
A practical hatch will keep selling. Toyota passed 3 million Prius a while ago.
I think the Prius C might cannibalize a few regular Prius sales, but it spells absolute doom for the Honda Insight hybrid.
53 mpg for B-segment money? It's going to fly off the lots.
Looks like they had about 12, maybe 12.5% market share back then.
Around 14% now and trending up.
Impressive growth.
My guess in the case of Toyota and the Prius. It was all about raising their corporate mileage to sell gas guzzlers at a big profit.
That sounds like what is often throw against GM as a negative--selling larger vehicles at a profit!
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
My son in law likes the mileage he gets with his Yaris. He would much rather drive their GMC PU truck. Now that they both work from their home office the Yaris sits in the driveway most of the time.
Agree about Honda's half-hearted hybrid efforts. Go for the Gold, guys, not Silver.
No doubt the only reason small cars exist at all in American is to help meet CAFE standards. Note how just about every manufacturer is right at the lower limit (few exceptions).
If not for CAFE, I honestly think B-segment cars would not exist here.
Scion FR-S will serve the middle, so they could sandwich that with a Supra on the high end and a coupe based on an existing car at the entry level.
At Honda, the CR-Z does nearly 3/4ths of the volume of the Insight.
I'm not convinced that's enough, though, to justify a hybrid coupe. The Veloster is crushing the CR-Z in sales.
Toyota used to have a coupe lineup, but the brand was way more interesting at one time, too.
Too extroverted for me, I'd rather see the same engine in a Rio5, but I bet it will sell well to a demographic younger than me, raised on Origami and Anime.
Veloster could be the next CRX...the current model unfortunately is the HF model. :sick:
Remember those? My roommate in college owned one. All of 62 horsepower! Gross, not net!
Then again it got about 45mpg. Veloster does 40mpg. Adjusted down, too.
The turbo could actually bring comparisons to the Si. Let's see.
Anime isn't all new...I remember being sure to watch Starblazers when I was in kindergarten - the very early 80s. A lot of the new generation doesn't seem to like cars at all, and will be happy with a hand me down Corolla or something equally invisible. I don't know how car savvy the next demographic will be.
I bet you could easily get an HF over 50mpg in highway cruising...just don't crash it.
Might save them from a heart Attack:
Study: Owning a car, television ups odds of a heart attack
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57357264-10391704/study-owning-a-car-tele- vision-ups-odds-of-a-heart-attack/
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
In Toyota news, Toyota " is now shipping cars and trucks built at North American plants to 19 countries, including South Korea and Saudi Arabia, and aims to significantly boost the volume, totaling 16,700 units a year ago, Inaba told reporters at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit yesterday."
Toyota Says North America to Become Global Export Base (Business Week)
I think they may go for the more connected models - tech savvy, not car enthusiasm.
That's why automakers are wise to put stuff like Bluetooth and smart phone connectivity in their entry models.
It's more important for, say, the Scion iQ or a Yaris to have Bluetooth than the types of things we might have wanted (a manual trans, an upgrade engine option, etc).
In college I shopped for a cheap pocket rocket and the only amenities I wanted were A/C and a cassette player. Even the A/C was not an immediate need, but I thought ahead that I would become a professional in a couple of years and really needed A/C if I was going to wear a suit.
I'm sure the whole concept of a pocket rocket remains foreign to an 18-25 year old today, and they probably want support for voice commands and enough charger sockets and storage for all their gadgets.
And the rest of that is for the younger set who will be able to afford to drive at all, which is also becoming less attainable. Maximize the profits, I guess.
My kids can walk to their schools, even high school. Won't be an issue.
In fact I wonder if they will even want a car. Right now they just want smart phones.
http://www.autoextremist.com/
Note some of the language is NSFW.
He's also convinced it will never see the light of day.
How 'bout an IS coupe, though?
We have an IS coupe, don't we? Well, the cabrio that almost nobody buys, and those who buy it never lower the top.
I think it's not a bad thing that some kids don't drive.
BMW makes in the neighborhood of 250k vehicles at its SC plant yearly (2+ million in its lifetime so far), and exports over 60% of them. They just announced a further $900 million expansion today to allow for the manufacture of a new X vehicle.
I would like to see other manufacturers owned by foreign firms follow this route.
Yeah, saw that on Automotive News. I get their daily e-mail update.
Lots of new jobs, hopefully.
That's really BIG news for the upstate area of SC.
The guy pulls no punches, he's usually brutal. Ever heard him on the radio?
He's about as uncensored as you can get. And he's critical of Toyota - saying they won't have the guts to produce it.
It's different, but again, it has LFA syndrome - nice from the sides, not so much from the front and back. And he's right, chances are it will never exist (or if it does, after a 10 year gestation then in watered down form)
I didn't like the R8 until I saw it in person. There's something to be said for the proportions that you just can't see in 2D.
I liked the Chevy Tru 140S best among concepts:
http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/09/chevrolet-tru-140s-concept-is-the-meaner-cruz- e/
Least favorite was this:
http://www.autoblog.com/2012/01/09/chrysler-700c-concept-minivan-detroit-2012/
Copying the Honda Oddity, I guess. Wow, that pushes the boundaries on ugly.
That Lexus I neither love nor hate. I think they intentionally exaggerate the concepts to frame and emphasize the hourglass grille.
I do like that they are taking risks.