James2 :
Even though it doesn’t make a “V8 musclecar” even Toyota feels the irrational urge to burn rubber occasionally, witness the IS-F and on/off LS-A supercar. They think throwing cubic money at NASCRAP and F1 ($400 million per annum! Zero wins!!) will help build credibility as a maker of sporty cars.

Yes, but the IS-F is mainly one engineer dropping a V8 engine into an existing vehicle. It’s “budget dust” compared to the dough it has taken to bring Camaro and Challenger and such to the market. LS-A is just a few more specks of that dust — a few prototypes.

“Winning” in F1 is a tough nut to crack. The top few teams are so entrenched that they’ve won virtually every race, for decades. At the least, Toyota has improved yearly for its efforts — look at Honda to see what “failure” is all about, as its F1 team truly embarrased the company.

Toyota in NASCAR is really a strange development. There’s certainly no “research and development” to be performed there — it’s really just “advertising” and not anything else. And with all of the Big 3 Toyota Haters going ballistic, plenty of the publicity has been negative. In the end, though, it sure has created a ton of publicity!

As an aside here, the really odd duck of motorsports is Honda powering the IRL. In a collapsing economy, this becomes even more nonsensical. Advertising that “they won the Indy 500″ seems to be the only thing of value, and the Big 3 Honda Haters aren’t any happier with it than they are with Toyota in NASCAR.

….perhaps they were just lucky that Ford stopped caring about the Taurus and let the Camry take over as the #1 seller.

Oh, please. That’s Big 3 apologism at the extreme. The general history of the Big 3 has been “they ignored ‘cars’ in their zeal to build more trucks and SUV’s” — meanwhile, the imports just continued to improve and refine their cars. This is what is so wrong with Lutz and the other “geniuses” at the Big 3 — they just let these vehicles become outdated and mediocre, and didn’t do a thing to make them more reliable. Camry and Accord have beat their butts for entirely good reason.

What about the $2 billion Toyota arguably burned build the hulking new Tundra and its Texas plant? That doesn’t sound like smart business, does it?

Didja read what I wrote in my original message? Something about “building cars that LOTS of people want to buy.” Don’t forget that the full-size truck segment has always been a huge portion of the consumer vehicle market — it’s very most definitely a segment for which you can build vehicles that LOTS of people want to buy. Toyota certainly found that this market didn’t want its previous, smaller “big” trucks, so it needed to enter the full-size truck market with everything it could throw at it. Of course, four-dollar gas and the credit collapse have hurt all truck sales, not just Toyota’s. But the segment should continue to move a lot of vehicles over the years to come.

Bottom line: rage all you want at the Mustang, Camaro, etc. but if the market was strong, I bet Toyota would be scrambling to resurrect the Supra. In a big, diverse market such as ours, there’s plenty of room for Priora and Mustangs.

Umm, well, gosh, but the market was very strong over the past few years, and Toyota didn’t lift so much as a finger to resurrect the Supra or the Celica or the MR2 or the 2000GT. But yes, I agree with you that there is room in the market for V8 muscle cars. I’m just saying that the relatively paltry amount of sales to be made with them isn’t likely to earn the manufacturers much in the way of profits.

As for comparing to the Z or the other sports cars, you get to play in that sandbox when your core products are solid.

Sure there is room for a bit of sportiness… look at Mazda who has sold based on that rep plus good looks (new 3 with braces not included).

As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the equivalent of what happened in the US between 1929 and 1932. The market cratered to ONE FOURTH of it’s pre-depression level.

How many car companies would survive THAT scenario?

I’ll guess – in the US market – only a handful.

Toyota (certainly not Scion maybe not Lexus Div).
Honda (probably not Acura Div).
Hyundai-Kia (perhaps only as Hyundai, though).
Ford – MAYBE – if GM and Chrysler collapse soon enough to allow Ford to soak up some of the “US cars only” buyers

(of course, these same folks conveniently “forget” / “don’t notice” that many of Ford’s products for the US are built in Canada and Mexico, ditto Chrysler, and many GM products are from Canada, Mexico and even South Korea)

One of my colleagues even went so far to take note of that fact, then change his story of “only buying US” to “where the HQ is”. Sad, eh?

So I replied that Honda was sick of Japan Inc and rumors had it that they might be moving to the US. He was speechless…

“Auto sales have been down by 30% and the combined market share of GM and Chrysler is 30%. So, everyone will be back to normal after they are gone.”

No, no, no WSN. You got the script wrong. The script is when CHRYSLER goes out of business “everyone (GM) will be back to normal”. Even though Chrysler’s market share split between the two remaining domestics is not enough to make GM viable without the restructuring the “best and brightest” say needs to happen. This script of course assumes that ALL of Chrysler’s sales (last year, 1,450,000+) go to GM and Ford, which they won’t. A significant amount will go to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, etc. So the “dead cat bounce” will be minimal. Of course GM going under would allow everyone, including Chrysler to be viable but those here just can’t seem to wrap their brains around a world without GM like they can a world without Chrysler. Go figure.

If Toyota had just built the Supra, then cancelled it, I would understand that as prudent cost cutting, but instead I see a Toyota that can’t make a sports car, or even make a regular car that is competitively sporty in top trim, because they haven’t played that game in years.

Bottom line: rage all you want at the Mustang, Camaro, etc. but if the market was strong, I bet Toyota would be scrambling to resurrect the Supra. In a big, diverse market such as ours, there’s plenty of room for Priora and Mustangs

But Toyota doesn’t make any non-luxury sporty cars. If they are Lexuses, they can charge a premium for them that makes up for the high costs of development. That is, GM should make sporty Caddys, not Pontiacs.

As for Toyota’s cash reserves being low, I don’t buy that for a second. Plus, even if that’s true, they have a AAA credit rating-they can borrow infinite amounts of money if needed, even in the current credit market. Toyota may lose money this year (or break even), but in the past four fiscal years or so they made ten billion dollars a year. GM lost something like thirty billion dollars last year-before the economy tanked.

But like I said before, if you prefer GM’s old product, then by all means hoist up “Maximum Bob” by his undies, but from what I can see he is changing GM product for the better.

I do think he’d be a better fit in a near luxury or sporty brand (Acura for instance) and that it is a real shame that GM needs to pay him that salary when there are car guys across the country, and already in the company, who could provide that same perspective for a fraction of the cost.

And then, in real life, they build a Corolla.

The market’s tank has really hit Toyota hard –such that they need to ask their employees for a 10-percent pay cut and they’re kicking out the CEO– so maybe they aren’t that brilliant after all; perhaps they were just lucky that Ford stopped caring about the Taurus and let the Camry take over as the #1 seller.

What about the $2 billion Toyota arguably burned build the hulking new Tundra and its Texas plant? That doesn’t sound like smart business, does it? Autoline Daily is reporting that Toyota’s cash reserves is down to $18 billion, not much better than Ford’s position. No one criticizes ToMoCo management here the way we pound the D2.5, maybe because Tokyo (er, Toyota City) is so far away.

Bottom line: rage all you want at the Mustang, Camaro, etc. but if the market was strong, I bet Toyota would be scrambling to resurrect the Supra. In a big, diverse market such as ours, there’s plenty of room for Priora and Mustangs.

I’ll go out on a limb and hope that if anything happens to his contract at GM he goes to Toyota and burns the conservative house down. Because wouldn’t the world be a better place if every camry could power oversteer?

I think Lutz is an absolute, total moron. The biggest buffoon in the entire auto industry. GM can’t make money because NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WANT TO BUY HIS PRODUCTS. It’s like your thought about “power oversteer” — that’s about the 100% total opposite reason why more people buy the Camry than any other car in this country.

The money wasted by Lutz and the like-minded buffoons at the other 1.8 on Camaro/Challenger/Mustang has been absolutely ludicrous. You bet, a veritable handful of sales of V8 musclecars ought to bring these companies to profitability.

NOT!

In spite of all of the venom spewed at Toyota in here daily, they have succeeded by following mainly one principle:

“Let’s make cars that LOTS of people will want to buy.”

Yes, I know, they stopped building truly “sporty” cars quite a while back. Because, you know, for one simple reason: NOT MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT THEM, relatively. If you’re gonna spend all of your time and money and effort to build something, why not shoot for products that’ll make as much money as possible?

And that’s the difference between Toyota and the 2.8. Oh, I suppose a few people will buy the G8, Mustang, Camaro, Challenger, 300, Charger, and so on, but they’ll all add up to maybe a tenth of the Camry sales. Or some other number well under half of Camry sales — it’s hard to say what’s really going on now, sales-wise.

If Maximum Bob is so good, just let him “prove it” by doing one thing — come up with the “most sales for a car in the country,” like way back, when the Taurus handily beat Camry and Accord. If Lutz is such a “product genius,” why can’t he do a simple thing like that?

I’m sure there’s more to the story than that. In the 80’s oil bust when FDIC was shutting banks down, they treated borrowers that way, but there was a reason: government employees get paid the same no matter what happens. A sane lender doesn’t want to arbitrarily force a borrower out of business.

All across the land bankers are still acting like tough minded thugs with struggling customers while at the very same time getting government handouts themselves. If full on socialism is bad, this round of “private-public partnerships” is proving to be even worse.

For some reason, all the dealers in the Port Orchard – Bremerton area where I live are still up and running, although I have no knowledge if any of them are close to the edge.

Not that there isn’t a few good reasons to get pissed at GM, but again, I don’t see how Bob Lutz is the cause of any of them. I’ll go out on a limb and hope that if anything happens to his contract at GM he goes to Toyota and burns the conservative house down. Because wouldn’t the world be a better place if every camry could power oversteer?

Non-optional, non-debatable.

Has been since, oh, the dawn of the industry.

We just came off the most ridiculously long, strong, and unsustainable upswing in history.

Econ (and physics) teach that the universe seeks equilibrium. There is going to be a counterbalancing down to make things close to right again. Look at industry sales over the last 80 years. There is always a bust after the boom. Always.

11MM? Has Lutz been raiding Hunter’s old stash?

GM and GMAC were prime movers in the sub-prime market. Zero percent for anyone with a heartbeat?

I hope he is “productive” (quote-wise) for another 20 years. I will miss the simply amazing things he says.

BTW-Since when has the current management team at GM shown that they can survive in a market of any size?

wsn-no one at GM has any idea that there is any auto industry outside of Debtroit. They are still trying to figure out where all those unaccounted for vehicles have come from.

Cheerio,

Bunter

I know Farago’s got that Northeasterners-bash-everyone gene, but this seems half-baked even for same.