Toyota profit for Prius Gen 3?

I think you misspoke. You probably meant Government Motors.

 

I would not be surprised at all if Toyota doesn't really know how much a Prius actually costs. It would be surprising to me if their accounting system attributed costs/margin on a car by car basis. The engineers design systems and parts that are used on multiple product lines, the inside sales reps sell many product lines, investment today may be accounted for over some period of time (is that new plant amortized over 10 years or over 50? Do you include the value of the real estate as an asset against the cost of the car?), assembly line machinists work across multiple lines, supply chain managers work across multiple car lines, etc. etc. Add to that all of the recycling efforts Toyota has put in place - when they recycle/reuse battery material, how is that accounted for? It seems that figuring out the actual cost of an individual Prius would be quite a task - certainly beyond my accounting system.

I imagine they have design, manufacturing, selling, etc. cost models which they believe are reasonably accurate, but I don't think you can say your Prius costs $16,759.44 to get from nothing to your dealer's lot. It seems that at the end of the day the car business is a cash flow business - you don't have enough cash coming in to pay your bills, you offer incentives to increase the cash flow. When you have billions of dollars of inventory as a buffer you can do those types of things. Also don't forget about the cost of money - you would need to factor that into every car. Ah yes - don't also forget to account for the cost of those pesky recalls and lawsuits.

Actual margin per car seems to be a difficult way to do accounting for an entity of Toyota's size. Of course, I could be wrong......

 

Hells yeah! Any Prius that costs more than $25k is definitely stuffing somebody's pockets...