Two quick notes on the car business.
No big treatise this time — just a couple of data points confirming steady trends:
- Toyota’s profits hit a new quarterly record, again. Also, water continues to be wet, fire is hot, and the sky is blue. Joking aside, Toyota is running about as well as a company can these days. It’s benefiting from a weak yen and other transient factors, but it’s benefiting above all from its own corporate DNA. The difference between Toyota and other car makers right now is that Toyota’s simply better.
- July brought a grim milestone for US car makers: For the first time ever, their foreign competitors outsold them in the US market.
Category: Transportation
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
3 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
[...] Two quick notes on the car business. [...]
Yes, Toyota is off and so are all the other car manufacturers. It was happening long before the sub-prime lending debacle and the rise of gas prices. I am a 20 year veteran of the car industry and I saw it coming when their products were stale and they would not address the public’s concerns and interests.
Many of the domestic manufacturers were going the way of the “Oldsmobile” with their advertising and products and to not see it coming was true “aloofness”. I hope that all major corporations learn from this. What has worked in the past will not always guarantee success in the future. Yesterday’s successes can bring you into the present but what will take you into the future is determined by what you do today. Look ahead.
Good words, Lisa. It’s so very tempting to think that what got us here will take us up to the next level, when in fact we should always be re-examining.
Part of the reason it’s hard is that, amid the day-to-day grind of business, it’s difficult to separate truly timeless principles — honesty, good value for money, a spirit of inquiry that feeds innovation — from the current application of those principles that happens to have worked so far.