Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has completed a periodic review of the ratings of Toyota Tsusho Corporation and other ratings that are associated with the same analytical unit. The review was conducted through a portfolio review in which Moody's reassessed the appropriateness of the ratings in the context of the relevant principal methodology(ies), recent developments, and a comparison of the financial and operating profile to similarly rated peers.

Global auto sales for Japanese carmakers halved in April as the coronavirus pandemic forced governments to impose lockdowns that left streets empty and showrooms deserted. Japan's top eight automakers together posted a decline of 50.1% in April sales, according to a Reuters calculation. Toyota Motor's worldwide sales including units Daihatsu and Hino fell 45% to 472,703 vehicles - the fourth straight month of declines.

Organizers said Friday they were cancelling the 2020 New York auto show that had previously been pushed back until August, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the venue's use as a field hospital. The Javits Convention Center remains set-up as an active hospital and is in standby mode for the foreseeable future, organizers said. A string of auto shows have been canceled this year and some automakers -- like Toyota Motor Corp -- are opting to hold virtual unveilings of new vehicles.

Toyota Motor Co. went online Monday to unveil the 2021 Toyota Sienna and 2021 Toyota Venza at a virtual press conference. The redesigned, all-hybrid Sienna was designed, engineered and assembled in the U.S., the company said, and is rated to tow up to 3,500 pounds with a front design inspired by the Shinkansen Japanese Bullet Train. Toyota's Hybrid System II delivers 243 total horsepower, 53 hp less than the current model's V6 engine, and a manufacturer-estimated 33 combined MPG fuel economy, the company said.

Japanese automakers Toyota, Nissan and Honda said they are gradually restarting in Mexico as the nation's automotive industry reboots in line with a broader economic reopening, despite still-high numbers of new coronavirus cases. Mexican officials in mid-May said the automotive industry could exit the coronavirus lockdown before June 1 if approved safety measures were in place. Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co Ltd told Reuters on Monday that they were preparing to gradually resume operations, and Honda Motor Co Ltd last Friday said it had begun a gradual return to operations.

New York, May 27, 2020 -- Moody's Investors Service, ("Moody's") confirmed its A1 long-term senior unsecured and short-term Prime-1 ratings for Toyota Motor Credit Corporation (Toyota Motor Credit). The rating actions follow similar actions on the ratings for Toyota Motor Credit's parent, Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota, A1 negative).

There’s no need to explain the Toyota Land Cruiser, one of Toyota’s earliest successful products. The 2020 Toyota Land Cruiser Heritage Edition celebrates some 60 years of popularity of a vehicle that has survived the segment’s “mall wagon” phase and the rise of crossovers. Debuting in 1996, the LX 450 was little more than an 80-series Land Cruiser with cladding, a Lexus badge and a higher price.

(Bloomberg) -- At a factory near Germany’s border with the Czech Republic, Volkswagen AG’s ambitious strategy to become the global leader in electric vehicles is coming up against the reality of manufacturing during a pandemic.The Zwickau assembly lines, which produce the soon-to-be released ID.3 electric hatchback, are the centerpiece of a plan by the world’s biggest automaker to spend 33 billion euros ($36 billion) by 2024 developing and building EVs. At the site, where an East German automaker built the diminutive Trabant during the Cold War, VW eventually wants to churn out as many as 330,000 cars annually. That would make Zwickau one of Europe’s largest electric-car factories—and help the company overtake Tesla Inc. in selling next-generation vehicles.But Covid-19 is putting VW’s and other automakers’ electric ambitions at risk. The economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has pushed the auto industry, among others, to near-collapse, emptying showrooms and shutting factories. As job losses mount, big-ticket purchases are firmly out of reach—in the U.S., where Tesla is cutting prices, more than 36 million people have filed for unemployment since mid-March. Also, the plunge in oil prices is making gasoline-powered vehicles more attractive, and some cash-strapped governments are less able to offer subsidies to promote new technologies.Even before the crisis, automakers had to contend with an extended downturn in China, the world’s biggest auto market, where about half of all passenger EVs are sold. Total auto sales in China declined the past two years amid a slowing economy, escalating trade tensions, and stricter emission regulations. EV sales are forecast to fall to 932,000 this year, down 14% from 2019, according to BloombergNEF. The drop-off is expected to stretch into a third year as China's leaders have abandoned their traditional practice of setting an annual target for economic growth, citing uncertainties. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect just 1.8% GDP growth this year.The global market contraction raises the prospect of casualties. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire has warned that Renault SA, an early adopter of electric cars with models like the Zoe,  could “disappear” without state aid. Even Toyota Motor Corp., a hybrid pioneer when it first introduced the Prius hatchback in 1997, is under pressure. The Japanese manufacturer expects profits to tumble to the lowest level in almost a decade.Automakers who for years have invested heavily in a shift to a high-tech future—including autonomous vehicles and other alternative energy-based forms of transportation such as hydrogen—now face a grim test. Do their pre-pandemic plans to build and sell electric cars at a profit have any chance of succeeding in a vastly changed economic climate? Even as Covid-19 has obliterated demand, for the car makers most committed to electric, there’s no turning back.“We all have a historic task to accomplish,” Thomas Ulbrich, who runs Volkswagen’s EV business, said when assembly lines restarted on April 23, “to protect the health of our employees—and at the same time get business back on track responsibly.”Volkswagen Pushes AheadGlobal EV sales will shrink this year, falling 18% to about 1.7 million units, according to BloombergNEF, although they’re likely to return to growth over the next four years, topping 6.9 million by 2024. “The general trend toward electric vehicles is set to continue, but the economic conditions of the next two to three years will be tough,” said Marcus Berret, managing director at consultancy Roland Berger.Volkswagen’s Zwickau facility became the first auto plant in Germany to resume production after a nationwide lockdown started in March. Before restarting, the company crafted a detailed list of about 100 safety measures for employees, requiring them to, among other things, wear masks and protective gear if they can’t adhere to social-distancing rules.The cautious approach has reduced capacity—50 cars per day initially rolled off the Zwickau assembly line, roughly a third of what the plant manufactured before the coronavirus crisis. (VW said Wednesday that daily output had  risen to 150 vehicles, with a plan to reach 225 next month.) Persistent software problems also have plagued development of the ID.3, one of 70 new electric models VW group is looking to bring to market in the coming years. Still, Ulbrich and VW CEO Herbert Diess over the past three months have reaffirmed Volkswagen’s commitment to electrification. “My new working week starts together with Thomas Ulbrich at the wheel of a Volkswagen ID.3 - our most important project to meet the European CO2-targets in 2020 and 2021,” Diess wrote in a post on LinkedIn in April. “We are fighting hard to keep our timeline for the launches to come.”Diess has described the ID.3 as “an electric car for the people that will move electric mobility from niche to mainstream.” Pre-Covid, the company had anticipated that 2020 would be the year it would prove its massive investments and years of planning for electric and hybrid models would start to pay off.A more pressing worry that could hamper VW’s ability to scale up production is its existing inventory of unsold vehicles. The cars need to move to make room for new releases, but sales are down as consumers are tightening their spending. One response has been to offer improved financing in Germany, including optional rate protection should buyers lose their jobs. VW also has adopted new sales strategies first used by its Chinese operations, such as delivering disinfected cars to customer homes for test drives, and expanding online commerce.Other German automakers are similarly pushing ahead with EV plans. Daimler AG is sticking to a plan to flank an electric SUV with a battery-powered van and a compact later this year. BMW AG plans to introduce the SUV-size iNEXT in 2021 as well as the i4, a sedan seeking to challenge Tesla’s best-selling Model 3.A potential obstacle for all these companies—apart from still patchy charging infrastructure in many markets—is the availability of batteries. Supply bottlenecks appear inevitable given that the number of electric car projects across the industry outstrip global battery production capacity. And boosting cell manufacturing is a complicated task.China's (Weakened) EV Dominance For VW and others, the first big test of EVs’ appeal in a Covid-19 world will come in China. Diess has referred to China as “the engine of success for Volkswagen AG.” VW group deliveries returned to growth year-on-year last month in China, while all other major markets declined.Not long ago, China appeared to be leading the world toward an electric future. As part of President Xi Jinping’s goal to make the country an industrial superpower by 2025, the government implemented policies that would boost sales of EVs and help domestic automakers become globally competitive, not just in electric passenger cars but buses, too.With the outbreak seemingly under control in much of the country, China is seeing some buyers return to the showrooms, but demand for passenger cars is likely to fall for the third year in a row, putting startups like NIO Inc.  at risk and hurting more-established players like Warren Buffett-backed BYD Co., which suffered from a 40% year-on-year vehicle sales decline in the first four months of 2020.The Chinese auto market may shrink as much as 25% this year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, which before the pandemic had been expecting a 2% decline. EV sales fell by more than one-third in the second half of 2019.NIO, the Shanghai-based startup that raised about $1 billion from a New York Stock Exchange initial public offering in 2018 but lost more than 11 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) last year, was thrown a much-needed lifeline when a group of investors, including a local government in China’s Anhui Province, offered 7 billion yuan last month.Other Chinese manufacturers are counting on support from the government, too, including tax breaks and an extension to 2022 of subsidies, originally scheduled to end this year, to make EVs more affordable.For now, the government will also look to help makers of internal combustion engine vehicles, at least during the worst of the crisis, said Jing Yang, director of corporate research in Shanghai with Fitch Ratings. But, she said, “over the medium-to-long term, the focus will still be on the EV side.”America is Tesla CountryCompanies can’t count on that same level of support from President Donald Trump in the U.S., where consumers who love their SUVs and pickup trucks have largely steered clear of electric vehicles other than Tesla’s.The U.S. lags China and Europe in promoting the production and sale of EVs, and that gap may widen now that Americans can buy gas for less than $2 a gallon.“When you’re digging out of this crisis, you’re not going to try to do that with unprofitable and low-volume products, which are EVs,” said Kevin Tynan, a senior analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.Weeks after announcing plans to launch EVs for each of its brands, General Motors Co. delayed the unveiling of the Cadillac Lyriq EV originally planned for April. Then on April 29, the company said it would put off the scheduled May introduction of a new Hummer EV. The models are part of CEO Mary Barra’s strategy to spend $20 billion on electrification and autonomous driving by 2025, to try to close the gap with Tesla.In another move aimed at winning over Tesla buyers, Ford Motor Co. unveiled its electric Mustang Mach-E last November at a splashy event ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show. The highly anticipated model had been scheduled to debut this year. Ford has not officially postponed the release, but the company has said all launches will be delayed by about two months, potentially pushing the Mach-E into 2021.Elon Musk, whose cars dominate the U.S. electric market, cut prices by thousands of dollars overnight. The Model 3 is now $2,000 cheaper, starting at $37,990. The Model S and Model X each dropped $5,000.Musk engaged in a high-profile fight with California officials this month over Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, which had been closed by shutdown orders Musk slammed as “fascist.”  In a May 11 tweet, he said the company was reopening the plant in defiance of county policy. On May 16, Tesla told employees it had received official approval.During most of the shutdown in California, the company managed to keep producing some cars thanks to better relations with local officials regulating its other factory, in Shanghai. That plant closed as the virus spread from Wuhan in late January, but the local government helped it reopen a few weeks later in early February.First Zwickau, Then the WorldThe ID.3’s new electric underpinning, dubbed MEB, is key to VW’s strategy to sell battery-powered cars on a global scale at prices that will be competitive with similar combustion-engine vehicles. Automakers typically rely on such platforms to achieve economies of scale and, ultimately, profits. MEB will be applied to purely electric vehicles across all of the company’s mass-market brands, including Skoda and Seat.VW said it spent $7 billion developing MEB after Ford last year agreed to use the technology for one of its European models. Separately, the group’s Audi and Porsche brands are built on a dedicated EV platform for luxury cars that the company says will be vital in narrowing the gap with Tesla.VW plans to escalate its electric-car push by adding two factories, near Shanghai and Shenzhen, that it says could eventually roll out 600,000 cars annually, more cars than Tesla delivered globally last year.While China is the initial goal, making a dent in Europe and the U.S. is the long-term one. Like China, Europe had been tightening emissions regulations significantly before the pandemic. New rules to reduce fleet emissions will gradually start to take effect this year, effectively forcing most manufacturers to sell plug-in hybrids and purely electric cars to avoid steep fines.Because of the mandates, Europe’s commitment to electrification isn’t going away, said Aakash Arora, a managing director with Boston Consulting Group. “In the long term, we don’t see any relaxation in regulation,” he said.For VW, this crisis wouldn’t be the first time it started a new chapter in difficult times. Diess saw an opportunity coming off the manufacturer’s years-long diesel emissions scandal that cost the company more than $33 billion to win approval for the industry’s most aggressive push into EVs. When VW unveiled the ID.3, officials compared its historic role to the iconic Beetle and the Golf, not knowing that this might hold in unintended ways: The Beetle arose from the ashes of World War II, and the Golf was greeted by the oil-price shock in the 1970s.“We have a clear commitment to become CO2 neutral by 2050,” VW strategy chief Michael Jost said, “and there is no alternative to our electric-car strategy to achieve this.”(Updates with Tesla price cut starting in the third paragraph. An earlier version corrected the spelling of Berret in the ninth paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Rating Action: Moody's confirms Toyota Motor's A1 and P-1 ratings; outlook negative. Global Credit Research- 27 May 2020. Tokyo, May 27, 2020-- Moody's Japan K.K. has confirmed the A1 long-term ratings ...

In June last year, two Toyota Supras ended up on dynos courtesy of a Motor Trend run in Southern California and a Car and Driver tilt in Michigan. Both Supras put down more power at the wheels than Toyota rated them at the crank. This took no one by surprise since BMW's 3.0-liter B58 inline-six cylinder powers the Toyota, and BMW is known to suffer excessive modesty when quoting power figures for its engines.

The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Daimler AG, Tesla, Toyota, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler

A group representing many major automakers on Friday said it was intervening in a lawsuit that says the Trump administration did not go far enough in weakening -- but not freezing -- Obama administration standards to revise fuel economy standards. In March, the Trump administration said it would require 1.5% annual increases in efficiency through 2026 -- far weaker than the 5% increases in the discarded Obama era rules -- but abandoned its August 2018 proposal to freeze requirements at 2020 levels through 2026. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in April asked a federal appeals court to order the administration to reconsider its plan, saying it should have further reduced or frozen the requirements.

Moody's Investors Service has assigned provisional (P)Aa3 (sf) rating to the Senior Notes to be issued by Toyota Glory 2020 Phase II Retail Auto Loan Credit Asset-backed Securities, a domestic transaction backed by a pool of auto loans originated by Toyota Motor Finance (China) Company Limited (TMF) in China. The RMB[449,999,380.41] Subordinated Notes are not rated by Moody's.

A group of 23 U.S. states led by California, the District of Columbia and some major cities are challenging a Trump administration decision to weaken Obama administration fuel efficiency standards. In March, the Trump administration issued final rules requiring 1.5% annual increases in efficiency through 2026 - far weaker than the 5% increases in the discarded Obama-era rules - but abandoned its August 2018 proposal to freeze requirements at 2020 levels through 2026. Last week, a trade group representing General Motors Co , Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Toyota Motor Corp and others sided with the Trump administration on its plan and opposed a legal challenge to further weaken the requirements.

HANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI, May 25 (Reuters) - Cashback offers, up to 10 free oil changes, generous prepaid gasoline cards - these are just some of the giveaways China's auto dealerships are using to woo customers out and about after spending much of February and March in lockdown. Cui Peng, a Geely sales manager in the eastern city of Hangzhou, says unit sales at his dealership jumped 30% in April from March and they are hoping for 25% growth in May.

Mexico's auto industry reopening picked up pace on Tuesday, with Fiat Chrysler and BMW AG joining peers in gradually dusting off operations even as the wait for approvals slowed the return of Ford Motor Co and other companies. Fiat Chrysler on Tuesday began reopening two facilities in the central Mexican city of Toluca after a gradual restart of its operations in the northern city of Saltillo a day earlier, said a company spokesman. The announcement means two of Detroit's Big Three automakers have begun restarting Mexican operations.

Toyota Motor North America, Inc. (TMNA) and Discovery Education announced the winners of the TeenDrive365 Video Challenge, a national safe-driving public service announcement competition for high school students. From the nearly 1,000 submissions, ten winners were selected, along with 24 state merit prizes and one People's Choice winner. See all the winners at teendrive365.com

New York, May 27, 2020 -- Moody's Investors Service, ("Moody's") confirmed Toyota Credit Canada Inc.'s (Toyota Credit Canada) long-term backed senior unsecured ratings at A1. The outlook is negative.

The 2021 Toyota Venza marks the return of a crossover nameplate that dates back to 2009. This new Venza, however, is actually the descendant of a different crossover, one from the Japanese market called the Toyota Harrier, which has a history going back to 1997. The second-generation RX and Harrier were also same vehicle, and launched for 2004.

HANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI, May 25 (Reuters) - Cashback offers, up to 10 free oil changes, generous prepaid gasoline cards - these are just some of the giveaways China's auto dealerships are using to woo customers out and about after spending much of February and March in lockdown. Cui Peng, a Geely sales manager in the eastern city of Hangzhou, says unit sales at his dealership jumped 30% in April from March and they are hoping for 25% growth in May.