General Motors’ Asia Pacific president Rick Brown at the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday said comparing GM to Toyota is a waste of time and energy — ?????????????????????????????? — referring to the much talked about point that Toyota could surpass GM in global vehicles sold (volume) annually, as early as this year. GM’s Brown said […]

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Volkswagen has applied to delist from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, citing low trading volume and its plans to also delist from some European exchanges. This continues the TSE’s trend of losing (and not being able to replace, at least for the time being) overseas listings. There will now be only 25 foreign companies listed on […]

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1st-half fiscal 2007 sales of new autos are down 8.1% year-over-year to 2.48M autos. Backout mini-car sales and the figure stands at -8.8%. This is reportedly the lowest level in 33-years and the first time in four-years for mini-cars to have suffered a decline in sales (-6.8% y/y to 896,334 units sold). Ex-mini cars, […]

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Let the Nissan GT-R countdown begin.
Nikkan Kogyo reports Nissan (NSANY) (JP: 7201) CEO Carlos Ghosn will unveil the highly anticipated Nissan GT-R on Oct. 24 at the Tokyo Motor Show press day. Nissan is now taking pre-orders. The GT-R is said to be priced from the upper 7 million yen (approx. US$65,000+ at 115/1) range. […]

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Without doubt Toyota is disappointed (and probably a lot of other emotions) about Jim Press leaving for Chrysler. Press — who has been with Toyota for 37 years, is the highest ranking Toyota executive in the U.S. and the first American on Toyota’s board — is resigning effective September 14. “I was looking forward to […]

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A couple days ago we looked at Lexus — in short, it plans to target the “prestige luxury” segment where some car buyers have a fleet of cars and assets in excess of $5m — prompted by an article in the WSJ. Since then, reports out of the U.S. show further housing weakness, how subprime […]

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The Wall Street Journal has a nice Page One piece on Lexus, about how it is respected for its quality, but not a top choice, or even a choice at all, among America’s wealthy — some who have a fleet of cars. It looks like this will change however, as Toyota is readying to break […]

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