It does not matter how often people write about the automotive industry's worrying state of affairs. I have done so more frequently than I would like to, and things get more concerning every day. People may finally listen if that is voiced by someone like Akio Toyoda. Toyota's current chairman told Hans Greimel in an interview that he was disappointed with Nissan and Honda because "they didn't talk at all about the products" after addressing their tentative partnership in a press conference.
Toyoda was polite to frame that as a disappointment. Should he be more incisive, he would have said: "It's the products, stupid!" Automakers are so concerned with scale and the BEV push that they have forgotten how they make money: making cars, as Alfred P. Sloan once stressed. The Japanese executive – who was also Toyota's CEO from 2009 until 2023 – knows a lot about both.
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