Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
What The Hell Is Going On At Toyota?
Reuters his this exclusive report from Japan saying Toyota is maybe going to completely redo the big EV plans they announced just last year. Intrigue! This report is based on a document created by an internal working group. It sounds like Toyota put together this working group to Red Team their global EV strategy. It’s important to ask: Who leaked this report? Maybe it’s from someone in this internal team (or elsewhere within the company) trying to pressure the automaker to take up the working group’s suggestions. Maybe it’s from someone an another team trying to get Toyota to double-down on their current strategy. Maybe the company is trying to telegraph to investors that a change is coming. It could be an accident, of course, but I doubt it. What this report underlines is that Toyota’s EV strategy is definitively slower than other automakers (which we knew) and also maybe not settled (which we didn’t know). Toyota’s clearly insistent on pursuing hydrogen cars and the company’s President has been saying stuff about EVs being further out than the media proclaims. There’s too much about the report that’s unclear to make any definitive judgments, but this did stick out to me: WHAT?!?! Over my dead body. The Toyota Compact Cruiser is the best looking and most interesting Toyota product previewed in a decade. Don’t screw this up, Toyota.
GM Is Making Real Money
GM earned a pre-tax/interest profit of $3.9 billion in the third quarter of 2023 from North America, up 83% from the same quarter last year when supply constraints hamstrung pretty much every company that couldn’t make a pickup truck out of used masks. You can see GM’s full report here. Globally, the numbers are still positive, with GM earning $41.9 billion from all operations and an EBIT-adjusted net income of $4.3 billion. All of those numbers are up over last year. How, exactly, is GM doing this? It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to suss it out. You can see that the North American profits make up a large bulk of global profits, and we know that GM sold a lot of trucks and SUVs. So many trucks and SUVs. From their Q3 sales report:
Surpassing Ford F-Series sales calendar year to date: GM sold more full-size pickups than Ford in 2020 and 2021, and is on track to do so again in 2022. The Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban and GMC Yukon and Yukon XL earned close to 70% of the retail market for full-size SUVs in the third quarter. The Cadillac Escalade and Escalade ESV earned close to 31% of the retail market for large luxury SUVs, leading the No. 2 competitor by double-digits.
Trucks! It’s also worth noting that margins in North America increased while global margins decreased. It’s not unreasonable to expect that, with some supplies still restrained, this means we’ll see production for lower-margin vehicles lag behind the profitable trucks. These are positive numbers so it’s not a complete stretch to think GM can make up its goal of $13 billion to $15 billion pre-tax (they’re at $10.7 billion thus far).
Hyundai Breaks Ground On $5.4 Billion EV And Battery Plant In Georgia
Some of my kin originally hail from the Savannah, Georgia area and I’d like to wonder what my Grandpa Leonard would say if he were still around and I told him that a Korean automaker would be opening a $5.4 billion plan to make batteries for electric cars near where he grew up. I like to think he’d be excited, though I’d then have to explain how the Inflation Reduction Act encourages automakers to build things locally and that the South Korean government is a little pissy about it. He’d probably have a laugh at that. Would I then try to explain that, actually, the South Koreans make some of the best cars in the world and that this is a big deal? My grandparents on that side of the family exclusively bought American cars as far as I can remember so that might be a surprise. I guess I could make it more exciting by mentioning that the Mustang is now available as an electric SUV. According to this Automotive News story at the groundbreaking there will be Georgia’s two Democratic senators and one Republican governor. My granny is a fierce conservative but my grandpa never outlived his Democratic tendencies so maybe he’d find that interesting, too. Certainly the fact that one of the Senators is a fiercely progressive black pastor and the other is Jewish would be a bit of a shock! I say all this to remind people that the present always seems weird when viewed from the past. Even ten years ago this would have probably been surprising news, but now it seems inevitable.
Check Out The Skoda Enyaq iV vRS
My love for Skoda is well established and there’s no reason to spend a lot of pixels doing a breakout story on the new Skoda Enyaq iV vRS, but I think it looks great so here we go. This is basically a VW ID.4, with the same MEB platform underpinnings. In vRS form the Enyaq has two motors and AWD with a range of over 310 miles on the WLTP cycle. It looks nice! Doesn’t this look nice?
The Flush
On a scale from Upset-to-Livid how mad are you going to be if Toyota kills the Compact Cruiser? Now for the ugly list… – Tundra (outgoing model looked good but the new one looks too much like an American truck) – Crown (ok maybe it’s not horrific and maybe the whole lift up a sedan concept didn’t make sense to me) – Avalon (on it’s way out, it’s line they forgot to attach a front bumper) – Prius (in a vacuum sections of the car look alright but the entire package all together does not) The future is plug-in hybrid EVs. BEVs will never capture more than a fraction of the market. But eventually plug-in hybrids will be Battery/Hydrogen fuel cell hybrids. And Toyota is positioned to be WAY ahead of everybody when that time comes. Unless somebody invents a battery pack with megawatt charging rates, and builds megawatt charging infrastructure, Toyota is going to dominate. The BEV segment isn’t saturated yet, and there aren’t enough batteries for BEVs. Also, hydrogen infrastructure lags charging infrastructure. That means a fuel-cell hybrid would have more difficult adoption to begin with, and is completely out of the question when you add the high cost of in-demand batteries to it. Eventually, though, the 40-something% of the market that can be satisfied with a simple BEV will be covered. If new gasoline vehicles aren’t allowed, what do you cover the rest of the market with? Hydrogen infrastructure will still be far from ubiquitous, but we should be able to cover major transportation corridors. And for day-to-day driving you can charge your (small) battery at home. It would be the best of both worlds. 90% of the time your battery would suffice. When it doesn’t you’d be topping up with hydrogen in a few minutes/seconds rather than waiting many dozens of minutes to charge. Also, the speed at which you can refuel means we can cover a larger number of vehicles with less infrastructure than you need to charge BEVs along the highway. But I just don’t see that happening. Instead they’ll dither about petulantly whining that hydrogen is better (correctly!) while Tesla and Rivian and even GM continue to sell out, year after year, of BEV monsters. For the Hyundai plant, will it open with a standard USB cable? Speaking solely for myself, I’m not all that interested in trucks and SUVs, but I thought that hot Yaris was pretty cool. For an enthusiast who wants a comfy, fast-ish, weird car and has a family you could do a lot worse. I get that the styling isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I dig it. They got real weird with it. If you actually want a small electric crossover, your needs are going to be served by basically every automaker. Not shedding a lot of tears for this particular one, despite its odd looks. Number in the article is off by a decimal point, but they were nice enough to link to the data. “pre-tax revenue” and “post-tax revenue” are A: things you made up to make a bad point, and B: silly concepts. Your revenue is always the same before and after taxes. It’s inflation. And it’s not the supply chain. It’s overly exuberant economic stimulus. If your margin is flat and inflation is single-digit, you have record profits by dollars. Yes. This is a thing you do when the giant market you were planning on (China) becomes overtly hostile, and there is very clearly a severe recession on the horizon. You stop spending money. Especially on very expensive things that you will not be able to sell. Toyota is not the first. They will not be the last. “Globally, the numbers are still positive, with GM earning $41.9 billion from all operations and an EBIT-adjusted net income of $4.3 billion. All of those numbers are up over last year.” Repeat after me: It’s not inflation if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s not the supply chain if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s the corporations profiteering because they can. “up 83% from the same quarter last year” It’s not inflation if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s not the supply chain if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s the corporations profiteering because they can. “when supply constraints hamstrung pretty much every company that couldn’t make a pickup truck out of used masks.” It’s not inflation if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s not the supply chain if the corporations are posting record profits. It’s the corporations profiteering because they can. On a scale from Upset-to-Livid how mad are you going to be if Toyota kills the Compact Cruiser? I’m just gonna point at GM’s profits and you can guess the level and what I’m actually mad about from that. It doesn’t need a stupidly long hood, it’s a BEV, if there’s anything in the hood it’s a bad design, if there’s nothing under the hood it’s a bad design. It should be more of a cab over design like the Canoo EV but have a clear glass front and a small dash so you can see the ground in front of you through your footwell, which is really useful when offroading, and it would make for a more compact EV. Having an integrated roof rack and ladder will only worsen noise and make it louder (requiring more sound insulation making it even heavier). Just do what Ineos did with a reinforced roof strong enough to serve as a roof rack without horrible roof rack aero and noise. There… fixed what you said for accuracy. If you think hydrogen vehicles are the future, then I suggest you go buy yourself a Toyota Mirai and live the dream… LOL Here’s one you can pick up for $11,000 https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=657227941 And after you own one for a while, you’ll figure out why Mirais don’t hold their value the way Teslas do. It’s the next Betamax. I’ve asked this several times on car forums and yours is the first answer i’ve ever got.I guess that means lots of people are as bad at chemistry as me? haha There is an ELECTRIC F150. What the fuck are they waiting for? Toyota isn’t a serious car company “on the margins”. By that I mean that they take their bread-and-butter appliances seriously, the Camry, the Corolla, etc., in terms of development and support, but do not give the same commitment to the designated corporate outliers. So the interesting Toyotas are always a weird mix of “gosh wow” and “da fuque were dey thinkin’?” The FJ Cruiser was a good example; the Compact Cruiser seemed destined to be another, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it dies a stillbirth. Let it go. We sold all three FJ Cruisers last year for tens of thousands of dollars more each than we had bought them new. So I feel affection for Toyota and their reputation among a small but rabid element of American enthusiasts, but with better companies and choices out there, I’ll likely never buy one of their vehicles again…. I’m sure a fanboy or two will be here to correct me soon, but I really don’t understand very much of what Toyota is doing at all anymore. It seems like their attitude is more “you’ll get what you’ll get” rather than “we’ll make you what you want” and I’m just not sure that that’s sustainable in this day and age. I don’t think anyone here would disagree that they’re a bit behind the times right now, and before someone says “but the GR Corolla and manual Supra!” I personally can’t help but see those products as deeply cynical…and the way they’re creating artificial scarcity to drive up demand for them is harming enthusiasts as much as the existence of those products is helping them, not to mention it’s encouraging more horrific dealer price gouging. Alright I said it…come at me! 2). Good for GM. While they don’t have any products that really appeal to me other than the ones that are coated in unobtainium (Z06, ZL1, Blackwings, et cetera) I’m always happy to see American manufacturers succeed. Regardless of our political leanings I think us Muricans can all agree that successful home turf manufacturing is cool and good. I also just watched the Savagegeese video on the new GMC Sierra (I’ll watch anything they make even if it’s a car that doesn’t really matter to me) and I think GM has done some clever stuff with their trucks. They aren’t riding on the most up to date chassis, so they’ve found creative ways to make up for it…like snazzy interiors, LS-ing all the things while everyone else is going to V6s, offering the excellent Duramax diesel powertrains, etc. Smart decision making is keeping those products relevant. It’s impressive. 3). Make the Ioniq 6 N concept a reality you cowards. I’ll buy it too. Don’t threaten me with a good time. 4). If BMW made this and kept the price around 50k they’d sell every single one before it even hit a dealer lot. Why can’t we have nice things? Da Flush: I’m super bummed about this and am one of the 7-8 enthusiasts who actually like this class of vehicle. I really dig SUV styling, particularly the boxier stuff…but if you live in the city they’re just wildly impractical vehicles. Mini SUVs that keep the unique styling are super useful for those of us that need a versatile vehicle but don’t have a lot of space. It’s one of the reasons I wound up in a Kona N, and I unironically love the Bronco Sport and am happy it’s selling so well. The Renegade is a great looking car as well. I’d love to see more in this segment…I don’t have the aversion to crossovers that most enthusiasts do, so long as they’re unique and fun. For massive swaths of people they’re the most useful package for a daily. I was excited about the Compact Cruiser, and I wish they’d bring the tiny Jeep EV Europe is getting over here. Give me more mini trucks! I wonder with both Toyota and Honda whether or need they see the potential for raw materials shortages for the Batteries in EV’s in the not-too-distant future, will mean there is opportunity for the fuel cell to final get a foothold in the market and they can get a lead on that. If this is the case, I’m not sure if they’re right but it will be interesting to see. :-p Yeah, they rendered that one in green instead of one of the blander BMW colors…. Everything on the id4 platform is hopelessly depressing. I’ve been more excited about washing machines.
