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Toyota brings TRD Griffon GT86 to Goodwood [w/video]

In the midst of the 2013 Goodwood Festival of Speed, there's a particularly special Toyota running up the hill. This special entry is a GT86 (the cousin to our Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ) that's been poked, prodded, and tweaked by the minds at Toyota Racing Development. The result of TRD's fettling is a nearly race-ready car.
Starting with the body, the hood, doors, trunk lid, and wings are all made of carbon fiber. The lightweight treatment doesn't end there, though. The bumpers, fenders, and diffuser all feature carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, while the windows are now made of polycarbonate plastic.
Under the hood sits the same 2.0-liter boxer engine found in the standard GT86, but its six-speed manual gearbox features a shorter final drive ratio for improved acceleration. The coilover suspension has been firmed up, and a TRD mechanical limited-slip differential replaces the Torsen unit. The TRD Griffon rides on TWS 18-inch wheels and Yokohama Advan tires. To bring proceedings to a stop, TRD has fitted its own mono-block caliper kit, complete with more robust racing pads.

Toyota investing $200M in Southern manufacturing

Over the past two years, Toyota has invested more than $2 billion at its North American production facilities, and it apparently doesn't plan on stopping there. To keep up with recent strong sales, Toyota is investing an additional $200 million at its engine plants in the Southern US to increase production capacity of its V6 engines.
The bulk of this money ($150 million) will go to expand Toyota's engine plant in Huntsville, AL, which is currently responsible for supplying engines - four-cylinder, V6 and V8 - to eight of Toyota's 12 domestically produced vehicles. That includes the best-selling Toyota Camry (shown above).
Toyota didn't say exactly what improvements are being made to the plant, but this follows last year's $80 million investment in the plant that is set to be completed by next year raising the engine capacity to 750,000 annual units including 362,000 V6s. The remaining $50 million will go to the casting plants of Toyota-owned Bodine Aluminum in Missouri and Tennessee, which supply engine blocks and cylinder heads to the Huntsville engine plant as well as others in Kentucky and West Virginia. Scroll down below for the official press release.

Toyota sold a million hybrids in last nine months, 6M since 1997

Toyota's first hybrid model – the Prius – went on sale in 1997 in Japan. It took 14 years for the company to see a cumulative total of three million hybrids (a mark reached in March 2011). Today, Toyota announced that its global sales figures of all of its gas-electric models (and there are a lot of them now, including ones we've barely heard of here in the US, like the Crown Majesta or the Harrier Hybrid) have reached six million. Toyota calculates that all those hybrids have saved 41 million tons of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere. Toyota's ever-increasing hybrid sales pace means the company sold as many in the last three years as it did in the first fourteen. As you can see in our chart, the trendline shows that we'll hit the next-million mark in short order. In fact, Toyota says that it sold a million hybrids in the last nine months, the shortest time it has ever taken the automaker to sell that many hybrids. Part of the reason is that there are 24 hybrid Toyota and Lexus models available around the world, and Toyota says another 15 will be coming in the next two years. Anyone want to guess when Toyota will hit seven million? August? Worldwide Sales of Toyota Hybrids Top 6 Million Units Toyota City, Japan, January 15, 2014-Toyota Motor Corporation announces that cumulative global sales of its hybrid vehicles topped the 6 million unit mark as of December 31, 2013, reaching 6.072 million units1. The latest million-unit milestone was achieved in the fastest time yet for Toyota, taking just nine months. Helping mitigate the environmental effects of vehicles is a priority at Toyota. Based on its belief that environment-friendly vehicles can only truly have a positive impact if they are widely used, Toyota has endeavored to encourage the mass-market adoption of hybrid vehicles. As of this month, Toyota sells 24 hybrid passenger car models and one plug-in hybrid model in approximately 80 countries and regions around the world. Furthermore, within the next two years, Toyota will launch a total of 15 new hybrid vehicles worldwide, including the new "Harrier Hybrid" in Japan on January 15 and the new "Highlander Hybrid" in the United States in the near future. Toyota will continue augmenting its product lineup even further and increasing the number of countries and regions where it sells hybrid vehicles.