GLOBAL AUTO MAKERS are nishing to challenge the dominance of Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius hybrid with a slew of eco-friendly vehicles. But Honda Motor Co. is likely to pose the most formidable threat to Toyota when it unveils its new Insight hybrid car Thursday at the Paris Auto Show.
Toyota Motor Corp cut its 2009 vehicle sales forecast by nearly 7 percent as high fuel prices hammer demand for large cars and pickup trucks, and said it will speed up the rollout of hybrid and electric cars as their popularity grows.
The weaker outlook from the world's most profitable carmaker weighed on shares of European rivals and highlighted an increasingly difficult environment, where orders in the United States and Western Europe for high-margin, gas-thirsty vehicles is slumping.
Toyota Motor Corp, Japan's largest automaker, will raise prices on some models in the country for the first time in 16 years, paving the way for smaller rivals to pass on higher costs for raw materials to customers.
THE European branch of world's largest car maker, Toyota became the first four wheeler manufacturer to join the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net), a UN initiative bringing together organisations pledging to reduce carbon emissions on Tuesday.
Toyota Motor Europe is one of the six companies to join CN Net on Tuesday, a web-based network which impresses upon governments, local authorities, private companies and individuals to make large carbon cuts.
The battle between Toyota and Honda for supremacy in the hybrid petrol-electric car market is set to heat up with both Japanese carmakers set to introduce distinctive new models early next year.
Honda disclosed details on Wednesday of a hybrid hatchback that will be smaller and cheaper than its existing Civic hybrid sedan.
Toyota is due to unveil a larger version of its popular Prius. It has so far kept a low profile on the new model to avoid damping sales of the existing Prius.
Co Building New Platform For A Small Car, Rollout In 2010
Our Bureau BANGALORE
JAPANESE carmaker Toyota's planned compact car for India will be developed on an entirely new platform tailored for the Indian market.
The car, which will roll out of the Bidadi plant
Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) plans to produce 100,000 units a year of a new hybrid-only model slated for release in 2009 at a subsidiary in southern Japan, the Nikkei business daily reported on Saturday.
The new car, which will be Toyota's second dedicated hybrid model after the hot-selling Prius, will have a 2- to 2.5-litre engine and will also be sold under the company's luxury Lexus brandname, the paper said.
In a sprawling greenhouse with shiny silver ducts running through, stacks of cardboard boxes feature prints of a flower alongside the distinctive red Toyota logo. In an experiment aimed at putting to use some of the carbon dioxide blamed for global warming, the giant auto group is using Asia's largest greenhouse for potted flowers, stretching across five acres. "Nowadays you automatically think of C02 as a villain. But it's what plants need to grow," said Teruo Takatomi, president of unit Toyota Floritech Co. Ltd.
S Kalyana Ramanathan In a move that seems like making up for its delayed entry into the compact car segment, Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM), a joint venture between Japan's Toyota Motor and Pune-based Kirloskar Group, is planning to launch a series of models with engines varying between 1.1-1.3 litre over the next two to three years to address the 1-million unit compact car market in India.
Revving up the race for manufacturing hybrid vehicles on a mass scale that could reduce dependency on depleting oil resources and also address environmental concerns, Toyota Motor Corporation has announced that it plans to begin manufacturing lithium-ion batteries by next year for a plugin hybrid vehicle to be launched in 2010. This was announced at a Toyota environmental forum that was kicked off by an address, delivered on video, by R K Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
