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Toyota says no one wants a Toyota electric car

It's no secret that Toyota doesn't really have a heart in pushing pure electric vehicles. The very limited Scion iQ EV project was killed before it went very far and the RAV4 EV project with Tesla was always only meant to produce just 2,600 units, but it didn't even get that far. In short, by all public appearances, Toyota just doesn't see the value of a pure EV. "No one is coming to our door asking us to build a new electric car." – Toyota's Craig Scott Toyota's public reasoning for the lack of a Prius C EV, for example, has often been that customers don't want to compromise on range and that hydrogen is a better bet. Company executives like Bob Carter say so over and over again. A new comment by Craig Scott, Toyota's national manager of advanced technologies, says that the Japanese automaker, give a slightly different spin on things. "Toyota actually favors fuel cells over other zero-emission vehicles, like pure battery electric vehicles," he told the Los Angeles Times. "We would like to be still selling cars when there's no more gas. And no one is coming to our door asking us to build a new electric car." This, understandably, has riled up a lot of EV supporters, many of whom have called on all automakers to sell more electric vehicles. After all, if Nissan can sell around 3,000 EVs a month in the US, couldn't Toyota do something similar? Are there thousands of people coming to the door asking for the fuel cell sedan that Toyota will start selling in the US next year? That answer is unclear, but it certainly doesn't look like Toyota is backing off its H2 bet any time soon.

Toyota says president, chairman of scandal-hit Daihatsu unit to step down

TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp said on Tuesday both the president and chairman of Daihatsu Motor will step down almost a year after the small-car unit said it had rigged collision safety-tests. The departures are among the most drastic changes Daihatsu has made so far, as Toyota seeks to return the brand to its roots as one of Japan's most iconic compact car makers. Toyota faces a potential hit to its reputation from the safety certification lapses at Daihatsu, as well as separate governance issues at truck maker Hino Motors and affiliate Toyota Industries. The scandals at the three companies triggered a rare apology of Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda last month. In a statement, the world's top-selling automaker said its chief executive officer for the Latin America and Caribbean region, Masahiro Inoue, will replace Soichiro Okudaira as Daihatsu's president effective March 1. Daihatsu's chairman, Sunao Matsubayashi, will also step down and will not be replaced, Toyota added. The outgoing Okudaira had worked at Toyota for nearly four decades before becoming president of Daihatsu in 2017, a year after it became a wholly owned Toyota subsidiary. Toyota Chief Executive Koji Sato told reporters, however, that the organizational change at Daihatsu was not carried out as a punishment for the outgoing executives. In volume terms, Daihatsu accounted for 7% of Toyota's total group sales of 11.2 million vehicles in 2023, including those of the luxury Lexus brand and Hino Motors. Given the misconduct over the safety test certification applications, Daihatsu also will be removed from a commercial vehicle partnership known as the Commercial Japan Partnership Technologies (CJPT), the automaker said in a separate statement. The partnership was established in April 2021 by Toyota, Hino and Isuzu Motors to facilitate technology development for commercial vehicles. Suzuki Motor and Daihatsu joined in July the same year. Daihatsu's 10% equity stake in the partnership will be transferred to Toyota, the statement said. (Reporting by Daniel Leussink and Satoshi Sugiyama; Editing by Kim Coghill & Shri Navaratnam and Miral Fahmy) Government/Legal Hirings/Firings/Layoffs Plants/Manufacturing Toyota Daihatsu

New BBC Top Gear season is off to a great start

The past few years have been very demanding for Top Gear fans. The Jeremy Clarkson Top Gear got too big for itself, and the core quality of the series degraded as stunts and jokes gradually became more and more stale. Things came to a head with the Fracasgate, with Clarkson punching a producer in a very nice hotel in Yorkshire with a very nice brass plaque commemorating "The End of Clarkson's BBC Career". Fast forward to a year ago, when the BBC produced a new series of Top Gear, with famed breakfast show person and shouting enthusiast Chris Evans hosting. Laden with personnel and curiously lacking any direction, the first new season collapsed onto itself with Evans eventually quitting the entire shindig. After that, viewers received a new, Amazon-produced Clarkson-Hammond-May series called The Grand Tour, which was often brilliant and just as often hampered by writing as hackneyed as the last Clarkson years of Top Gear. Now the slate is clean. Evans is gone. The first Grand Tour season has aired. The BBC has had a good long time to re-evaluate its strategy. And the first episode of this season's Top Gear has aired in the UK - and will air March 12 on BBC America. Your first extended look at all new #TopGear, coming 5 March. See you there pic.twitter.com/lYoYOtrWxR — Top Gear (@BBC_TopGear) February 23, 2017 What an improvement! It seems like the producers have taken an ax to everything not strictly necessary for making a great car show, and they've left what is absolutely crucial. There are the three car guys, Matt LeBlanc, Chris Harris and Rory Reid. There is a new studio. There is a new track car. There is a celebrity, but it's not painful to watch. There are easy jokes, there are car jokes, there are Ronin jokes. Ronin jokes! It's as if Harris, by dissecting continuity errors in the 1998 film's BMW chase, is reaching out to us fans, saying he's one of us, and he did notice the wrong wheels when the black BMW falls from the bridge. (Other mistakes are wrong-colored tach needles, for instance.) The first car film is a quality Ferrari FXX K piece, with Harris enjoying one of the 40 built track-day specials on the bankings of Daytona. It's remarkable it was Harris who was allowed to drive the exclusive Ferrari, as the first "outsider" (in his words) to drive one; years ago Harris was one of the most vocal critics of Ferrari's practices, resulting in him getting banned from driving press Ferraris. But then again, this is a customer car.