2001 Toyota 4runner on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Toyota plans biggest stock buyback in over a decade

At the end of December, 2013 Toyota had a cash stockpile of 1.8 trillion yen ($17.5B US). As of March 31, at the end of its current financial year, company coffers are expected to swallow another 1.9 trillion yen ($18.4B US) in net profit - said to be a record sum for the Japanese automaker. In a gesture signaling a turnaround from the horrors of the global recession, Bloomberg reports that Toyota will buy back 60 million shares of its stock, as much as 1.89 percent of the company, for something like 360 billion yen ($3.5B US). It's the first buyback since 2009 and the largest buyback since 2003, when it spent roughly 390 billion yen ($3.8B US) repurchasing shares.
Company president Akio Toyoda founded the Toyota Mobility Foundation (TMF), a non-profit that will support international groups working on transportation issues in emerging markets. Half of the stock that Toyota buys, 30 million shares, will be sold to the foundation via the Japanese Trustee Services Bank for one yen per share, the dividend providing the foundation's initial funding. The other 30 million shares will be canceled, a company spokesman telling Reuters that the company wants to reward shareholders.
Industry analysts have been asking Toyota to either return money to shareholders or invest in new factories, but Toyota has ruled out the latter. After getting burned with excess capacity when the financial crisis came, the company is focused on extracting efficiencies from the plants it already has. Toyota has said it plans to complete the buyback by June of this year.

2014 Toyota Corolla coming Thursday, now with LED headlamps

Here's what we know about the redesigned 2014 Toyota Corolla: It will have "aggressive new styling" with "available seventeen-inch alloy wheels" an "available touch screen audio" system and "available LED headlights."
We know all of this because Toyota has seen fit to release a small assortment of teaser images of the 2014 Corolla, with those descriptions attached. The latest to hit the web shows LED lighting clusters, which, to Toyota's credit, don't appear to merely mimic designs already seen in the automotive world.
We should point out that the headlights do share a link to the units seen on the Furia Concept that was supposed to foreshadow the next Corolla, though the most interesting bits - namely the honeycomb inner pattern - have been chucked while the somewhat trapezoidal main units remain intact.

Next-gen Toyota Prius spied inside and out

Toyota has built itself into the industry's standard-bearer when it comes to hybrids, and it isn't going to let the poster child for gas-electric vehicles get stale on the market. These spy shots captured in California are our first good look at the next-generation Prius, which could come to market wearing a 2015 model year designation.
Even though it looks like Toyota may have blown its annual camouflage budget on this mule, we can clearly see that it will have the same iconic half-moon design that has been with the car since 2003. If so, this goes against reports from last year that suggested the car would be getting a different look inspired by the 2013 NS4 Concept. Although, this could also indicate that the Prius family will continue to grow - adding a new sedan - to the existing Prius C, Prius V and Prius Plug-In lineup.
These spy shots also give us an indication as to what the interior will look like, with a more stylish three-spoke steering wheel and an instrument panel design that sort of reminds us of a BMW. On the other hand, all the tape, cobbled together pieces and lack of space for a center stack display screen has us thinking this isn't what the final product will resemble.