From an article in the Time U.K.: Interesting article -- an interview with Toyota's president, Fujio Cho. Turns out that Toyota is really zeroing in on the Chinese market for hybrid vehicles (specifically the Prius), and Cho predicts the growing demand for cars in China will spark a world-wide gas shortage. Whoever mentioned that he bought stock in Toyota -- looks like a smart move!
Yes...I bought the stock! Paid 63.25/ share in Sept. and it's up to 73.28 this afternoon. However, it is a long-term investment so we'll see what happens. I still believe they are headed in the right direction with product development and as long as the quality level stays as high as it is, they will prosper, as will those of us who decided to support them.
It's an old news. http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/04/0101.html President Cho stated 130,000 THIS year on New Year's message.
Thank you for the correction! Wow; they've doubled production for 2004, and Diane notices the number of new Prii coming in is dwindling? Maybe they are pushing more of them in China. Don't know how accurate this is, but an article Google pointed me at yesterday saying that the Prius and the Lupo (a diesel automobile) were voted/awarded "most green" by a Paris environmental group. The article ends by saying that few Priuses were sold in France last year. (However, if the 2004 Prius was released in France late in the year, that might account for those numbers.)
We just returned from a week in Beijing. The traffic was appalling because many people have purchased cars in the last few years, in part because of the SARS epidemic which made people wary of public transit and bicycles. The dominant non-Chinese car maker by far is VW. I saw very few Toyotas and no Prii at all. I wondered about the Prius in China; it seems a natural fit. The air quality in Beijing is pretty awful with dust as an added irritant. We never got the raspy throats one got in LA during the worst of the smog, but the visibility was rarely more than a few miles. China is in a big push to get ready for the 2008 Olympics. Part of that plan, I am told, is a tightening of air pollution restrictions on cars and factories. This will help improve the air quality of course, but will have the added effect of creating huge demand for cleaner and more efficient cars. We were told that the Chinese government is encouraging the purchase of cars to bolster the native auto economy. When you think of 1.3 billion people emerging into a developed capitalist society, you KNOW there are going to be big changes. China, like California, will lead us into a new envrionmental paradigm by dint of sheer numbers. VW will be pushing diesels, and my partner and I concluded that bio-diesel will probably be a huge deal in China in the next few years. Our guide told us that diesels are making inroads. and bio-diesel is very much cleaner than petro diesel. China also has huge supplies of (used) cooking oil to use to make the bio-diesel. A win-win situation here. China does have some oil sources, but there is no way they will not have a major effect on gas prices world wide. Isn't it ironic that China will become more environmentally savvy than George Bush's benighted 19th Century administration? HUMU
That made me laugh, Bob :lol: I was wondering where you had been the past week. I'll be sending out my Seattle pics as soon as I get back to my PC at home.
Huge supplies? If every family used a half a pint of oil a day for cooking, and every family had a car (once China is half as developed as the US) then each family car would have about 1/20 of a gallon a day of biodeisel, if all that used cooking oil were recovered. However, an emerging country is going to have a LOT of people desperate for cars but unable to afford clean ones. And the central government is going to be more concerned with economic development than with cleaning up the environment. Mexico, much more advanced than China, also uses a lot of cooking oil, but there are no biodiesel cars there to speak of. It's a great idea, and would replace a small chunk of the petrolium demand, but probably requires more capital investment than either country is willing to commit. Here's an interesting episode: To combat pollution in Mexico City, they instituted a plan called "Hoy no circula." (Don't drive today.) Depending on the last digit of your license plate, you were forbidden from driving one day a week. At first it actually worked, and smog declined. But people stopped trading off their old junkers as they bought newer cars. They kept the junker to drive on the off day. Soon, there were as many cars on the road every day as there had been before, but 1/5 of them were the old junkers, dirtier than the average car, and smog was even worse than it had been before the experiment began. So they doubled the days you cannot drive, and again smog declined, but now it's as bad as ever, with even more junkers on the road. They have an inspection system, where you cannot drive without an inspection sticker, but there are enough corrupt inspectors that for an extra fee you can get any car stickered. It just costs a bit more if the car pollutes. China could control that if they can control corruption, but the real question is whether China is willing to impose on its people the additional transportation cost of requiring them to drive clean cars. I predict they will not, until China is as affluent as California. The good news is, by then perhaps the world will have run out of oil and we'll be forced to go back to horses.
I think most of the extra Prii go to Europe. In the Netherlands (one of the first countries on the mainland where the Prius was introduced in Europe) the car was introduced on Feb 5th. Shortly after that in Germany, Denmark and France (probably Belgium as well). So a lot of cars will go to those countries as well. Too bad the Netherlands only had an allocation of 1000 Prii for 2004.
Daniel! Horses are good. Even better than our Prii. Horses eat grass and not oil like the Prius. Horse droppings (from the free grass) make excellent fertilizer, not CO2 and other stuff like the Prius. Horses frequently repair themselves. The Prius doesn't. Horses reproduce themselves. The Prius doesn't. Come to think of it, I don't think it would be so bad if we all went back to horses for transportation. What was the hurry all about?
I too have been to China a couple of times, but the one thing to remember is that China and Japan still are not on the best of terms with each other. The Chinese have a long memory, and still remember the horrible abuse that happened to them in WWII. The last time I was there I was reading the English newspaper and there were a couple of articles denouncing the Japanese and in particular the lack of help or concern that Japan has toward all of the left over munitions. People are getting killed from them exploding, and injured from the chemical stockpiles. Then again, the english newspaper is just a PR pipe from the communist party, so you can't believe much that you read in it. Atoyot
I talked about cars in China, and Toyota's plans for China, to a co-worker who spends about 1/3 of the year in mainland China (and a bit of time in Taiwan), travelling all over the country talking to vendors. He had three observations about the situation: The people who have cars in China are the very rich -- factory managers, etc. Middle class folks -- people with technical positions, middle managers, etc., are just now beginning to be able to afford a car -- and these are the ~$6K (or under) very low-end cars. He doesn't see that changing within 5 years -- particularly, the point where people working in factories for $s a day can afford one. China places a 100% surcharge on any cars imported from other countries. Thus, a $20K Prius would cost $40K in China. There are rumors of inventive ways around this, apparently; some companies apparently send in almost the entire car, without the wheels, and then they put them on in China and call it a domestic car. :roll: Domestic cars are made by foreign companies who come in and build factories in China to make cars specifically for the Chinese market. These are either models sold elsewhere, but usually without most of the extras/luxury items, or very low-end models only sold in the Chinese market. VW got in their first, and apparently this was very good for them -- lot of market recognition, lot of people thinking car == VW. GM is also in there. Toyota... well, as Atoyot says, there is still a lot of antipathy towards the Japanese in China. The press and the government don't try to dampen it down, either. So that would definitely be a roadblock.
