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 [...]

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, the [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]