GM, you have no one to blame but yourselves for this one...
When are you going to have some pride and really make this company what it should be?
Toyota help offer has US fuming
With friends like Toyota Motor Corp, the world's richest automaker, do struggling General Motors Corp and Ford Motor Co really need enemies?
That question has been making the rounds among auto industry observers since Monday, when Toyota Chairman Hiroshi Okuda suggested Japanese automakers should raise their US car prices to help GM and Ford out of the deepening financial mess they're in.
Higher prices would slow US sales for Toyota and other Japanese giants like Honda Motor Co Ltd, giving their older and weaker North American rivals a chance to stave off further erosion in their US market share.
"We need to give some time for American companies to take a breath," Okuda was quoted as telling reporters in Japan.
A day after he spoke, though, Toyota and Honda both said they had no intention of raising car prices to help their US competitors. And Okuda's comments have been dismissed by some as a "mind game" or bid to rub Detroit's nose in Toyota's seemingly unstoppable success.
"It almost brings a tear to my eye," Edward Lapham, executive editor of Automotive News, said on Wednesday.
"Is this the new, arrogant automotive equivalent of noblesse oblige?" asked Lapham, writing in an online opinion column for the weekly trade magazine.
Toyota has already overtaken Ford as the world's second-largest automaker and industry analysts say it could soon zoom past GM, which has held the No. 1 spot since 1931.
Toyota has been eating GM and Ford's lunch for years and "they're starting to work on dinner too," said Burnham Securities analyst David Healy.
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