Tokyo: Big fat zero for Toyota
Posted by Paul Horrell at 12:30PM on Thursday 25 October, 2007 0 Comments
For the world's biggest car company at its home motor show, you've got to say the side-by-side Toyota and Lexus stands today look seriously lame.
This is not how it used to be for Toyota. In past years it towered over the Tokyo show, eclipsing everyone else with a hail of interesting and relevant concepts and production metal.
Today, combing the stand turns up just two fresh concept cars that have any production relevance: a vision of the new Lexus RX (oh be still my pounding heart) and (slightly more interesting) a thing called the iQ.
It wasn't even actually new because it was at Frankfurt last month; the news today is that they've said they'll build it.
And the iQ is quite nice, a very modern and compact Fiat 500 competitor basically. An expensive and nicely furnished baby car for people who don't price their vehicles by the yard.
Otherwise, we see the i-REAL, another in the company's like of Segway-alikes, which seems pale news given the Segway is a flop. And the sweet but irrelevant RiN, where the big story is the dashboard changes colour when it senses you're stressed and tries to calm you down. And the 1/X, an unfinished carbon car that any engineerig student could have knocked up in an afternoon.
As for production cars, it's a big fat zero.
Now the fact that Toyota isn't choosing to go to go big on the show might not mean it's in trouble. It might have simply decided it'll get more attention launching its cars between shows rather than at them.
But on the contrary, as far as I can see (and I've been to every one since 1993) the Tokyo show has always been an amazingly accurate bellwether for the coming fortunes of the Japanesed companies. If they don't put on a good show here, they usually follow with a tough couple of years.
And since we're talking about the company that just became the world's number one vehicle maker, that might be a fairly big story.
Advertiser links
0 Comments for "Tokyo: Big fat zero for Toyota"
POST A COMMENT USING THE FORM BELOW
Comments are now closed for the blog archives.
Bookmark with:
What are these?