Toyota: It's Lonely At The Top, Gets Credit Rating Lowered
by greenz.jp, Tokyo, Japan 
on 11.26.08
(Google Map image of unsold cars lined up at an airfield in Oxfordshire, UK)
Toyota just announced that while three other Japanese car makers will not participate in the next Detroit Auto Show, they plan to attend, and they have two new models to display. Not surprisingly, both models are hybrids.
Then there is the news that even the world's biggest auto maker just got its credit ratings lowered to AA, notes Reuters: Toyota Motor Corp had its top-notch credit ratings cut for the first time in a decade, hitting its shares and raising borrowing costs as an unprecedented slowdown reshapes the global auto industry. This rating will boost borrowing costs at Toyota, but US rivals General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler LLC are falling deeper into junk status. Scary, if you don't think the green economy is waiting just around the proverbial corner.
After Toyota, the next strongest global player is Honda, whose debt rating now stands two notches below that of Toyota. Even the strongest German players, such as Daimler and Volkswagen, are falling behind, according to The Times.
Back to the Google Map image. You can change the scale and have a look at the amount of shiny, new cars just standing there. I don't know what models they are, do you? Noone is saying there is no market for new cars, but the fact that all these marvels of engineering are just sitting out there to rust on an abandoned military airfield breaks my heart. What went wrong? The car industry must have known that what it has been doing is not sustainable.
According to NHK World, Toyota and Honda plan to introduce new hybrid-engine vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show. Subaru also will take part, while Nissan Motors, Mitsubishi Motors and Suzuki Motor will not participate, as car sales in the United States have declined sharply due to the financial crisis.
So-called "market-based solutions" have been the mantra of Big Business for decades. Now they are begging for bailouts from taxpayers, that would probably rather support more public transport and less pollution. Right?
Written by Martin Frid at greenz.jp
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Hey, neat! A few years ago this very same abandoned airfield was a site for one of my architectural projects at school. I decided the best thing for it was to turn it into a pirate village for ten years to grow a community of intellectual property vagabonds.
http://tinyurl.com/5zzjkb
They were using it for car storage then, too, but it looks like it's got even more crowded since.
Well, I'd support less pollution anyway. I'm tired of paying out taxes for all the politicians' schemes "for the greater good." Including public transportation. Get the government out of things and private industry will be more than able to step in and do the job right.
I'm glad to see that even Toyota can't avoid the economic problems we're having. These problems are due to much more than just environmental sustainability issues and have a lot to do with economic sustainability issues. We're headed for a world-wide wakeup call and all of our fiat monies and credit-based economies are going to start to break down.
Hopefully it will turn into a better, "greener" economy in which sound money practices and credit-on-credit lending is no longer a cornerstone.
All of the world's car makers are grossly over capacity: e.g. their factories can crank out far more vehicles than the world's highways and parking lots can hold.
The point being that they are all competing for a bigger slice of the pie, while the pie is only slated to grow significantly in developing nations like China and India.
WIth the "pie" now shrinking and the most tasty slice made up with SUV's rotten, there must be pain.
heh heh...what they should all do is make hybrid engines that can be made from rngines of older less efficient cars... then come up with a scheme where you trade in your old car for a new hybrid one with a smaller price tag... a MUCH smaller price tag..