2012 Toyota Highlander Limited on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Union to launch Toyota organization drive in Canada

Toyota may be heading toward some labor issues in the Great White North, as employees at a pair of Canadian Toyota factories may be set for a certification vote. The Unifor union, which was the result of a merger last year between the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union, will be holding the vote.
Over 40 percent of the employees at the Woodstock and Cambridge, Ontario factories have signed union cards, cresting the minimum percentage required to instigate a legal certification vote, according to Reuters. The Woodstock factory is responsible for RAV4 production, while Cambridge builds the Lexus RX350 and RX450h, as well as the Toyota Corolla. The two factories employ nearly 7,000 people.
It's unclear when the union will hold a certification vote at the two factories, but what is rather clear are the worker complaints. Employees are concerned about workers being hired on temporary contracts which lack the benefits of full employment, John Aman, head of organizing for Unifor, told Reuters.

Toyota nears $40B cash reserve as calls grow for new investment, payouts

With the April 15 tax deadline just a few months away, our US readers will be faced with a decision should they get a refund: save or spend? It seems this issue is one many of us face whenever there's a windfall, trying to decide whether we should set the money aside in an account of some sort or use it as a down payment on a new car or a trip to the Apple store. Unsurprisingly, major corporations face a similar, albeit more complex, issue.
Take Toyota, for example. With President Akio Toyoda at the helm, the Japanese manufacturer has gracefully weathered recalls and natural disasters, all while turning beaucoup profits. Last quarter, profits quintupled to 434.4-billion yen ($4.3-billion USD), according to Bloomberg. Toyota also upped its forecast for the end of fiscal year 2013 (which ends on March 31 for Japan), to a record 1.9-trillion yen (about $18.8 billion). Now, the Japanese brand is reportedly sitting on a cash pile of nearly $40 billion, leaving Toyoda-san in an envious predicament - what should the company do with all that money?
Some think Toyota should be doing something, anything with that big stack of cash.

2014 Toyota Corolla coming Thursday, now with LED headlamps

Here's what we know about the redesigned 2014 Toyota Corolla: It will have "aggressive new styling" with "available seventeen-inch alloy wheels" an "available touch screen audio" system and "available LED headlights."
We know all of this because Toyota has seen fit to release a small assortment of teaser images of the 2014 Corolla, with those descriptions attached. The latest to hit the web shows LED lighting clusters, which, to Toyota's credit, don't appear to merely mimic designs already seen in the automotive world.
We should point out that the headlights do share a link to the units seen on the Furia Concept that was supposed to foreshadow the next Corolla, though the most interesting bits - namely the honeycomb inner pattern - have been chucked while the somewhat trapezoidal main units remain intact.