Toyota news

Three GM truck plants will shut down around midnight tonight because of the strike at American Axle. Automotive News [AN; sub] reports about 9,500 workers at the Fort Wayne, Flint and Oshawa plants will be idled, in addition to the 2,500 workers who went home from the Pontiac assembly plant earlier this

On a you-can't-make-this-up page of news briefs from Moscow News Weekly (featuring such hilariously Russian headlines as "Newborn Babies Dumped In Chelyabinsk's Trash" and "Lemur Smugglers Caught In Southwest Russia") comes a little warning to companies looking to cash-in

Troubled Chrysler supplier Plastech's bankruptcy proceedings just got a little more complicated. Automotive News [AN, sub] reports that Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI)– which accounts for over half of Plastech's $1.4b annual business– filed a motion yesterday to force the plastics manufacturer

Everyone knows that when you travel to say, China, and someone offers you an amazing deal on a Swiss watch, you might not be getting the genuine article. Buy a discount Ferrari in Italy though, and you can safely assume you are getting the real deal, right? Wrong. The International Herald Tribune reports

Back in the day, Toyota used local businessmen to find dealers and deal with local politics. ToMoCo eventually bought its distributors, save Southeast Toyota in Florida and Gulf States Toyota in Houstonm (who still control prices, model mix and availability in 10 states). In the '90s, Southeast shelled-out

Do you know how many Matrices Toyota sold in the United States last year? That's not a rhetorical question; I have no idea. Toyota rolls the number into Corolla sales. No surprise there. The Matrix shares its underpinnings with the Corolla– and the Pontiac Vibe (same car, different wrapper).

According to The New York Times, Big Apple mayor Michael Bloomberg is about mandate that the City's 10k car service limos must average 25 mpg by 2009 and 30 mpg by 2010. As the vehicles in question currently average between 12 and 15 mpg, they'd almost certainly require hybrid drivetrains to achieve

Other than a $1.3b manufacturing facility in Mississippi, ToMoCo has no plans to open another U.S. production facility. And yet The Salt Lake Tribune reports that local lawmakers are dangling the prospect of a new Toyota factory to justify HB436, a bill authorizing $5m for a statewide English literacy

So now we know why former Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda was willing to punt BOTH of his turnaround plans, step aside for new CEO Bob Nardelli and share a co-presidency with ex-Toyota Prez Jim Press. According to The Wall Street Journal, Daimler's European accounts reveal that the Germans made the above

With three selling days left in the year's shortest month, Ford Sales Analyst George Pipas is preparing the financial community (and the Ford family) for the worst: "The retail business is not that strong." You got that right. Pipas is predicting a ten percent drop in Ford sales relative