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Two weeks ago, you saw the first pictures of the Toyota FT-86, which will also spawn a Subaru twin. This exercise in badge engineering gives hope to car enthusiasts who want a new, fun-to-drive Japanese car they can afford, unlike the Lexus LF-A about to be unleashed into the exotic car market.

In the below video, you will see a heavily-disguised prototype of the car being tested at the Nürburgring. The fact that the car is being put through its paces there bodes well, indicating serious sporting aspirations on the part of Toyota and Subaru.

Watch this space for ...

This is the car that Toyota and Subaru have been developing together over the past few years. Toyota owns a stake in Fuji Heavy Industries, Subaru's parent company, making this cooperation a natural one.

Using a Subaru-derived flat-four, the FT-86 will spawn a unique model for each of the two car makers, both of which will be built by Subaru at its Gumma plant.

Toyota has wanted to inject some excitement into its staid, conservative image, so it has hight hopes for the FT-86. It is rumored that the production car, which will look very similar to the concept ...

The 4Runner has been a Toyota mainstay for years. Its distinctively tall profile and relatively-high chassis clearing always signaled that this was a real SUV, with an emphasis on Utility.

As the years have gone by, the 4Runner has gone more upmarket, getting slightly bloated in the meantime. However, for 2010, Toyota has paired things back a bit, most notably getting rid of the 4.7L V8 that used to reside in the previous car, opting for a V6 as the range topper. With obvious design influences from the popular FJ Cruiser, the 4Runner tries a more modern look inside ...

Akio Toyoda, Toyota CEO and the founder's grandson, has gone public with a harsh assessment of Toyota's health. As it continues to lower its sales forecasts and lose money, Toyoda said that Toyota is "grasping for salvation" and that the company is on the edge of "capitulation to irrelevance or death."

Toyota, who once targeted 10M vehicle sales, expects to sell only 7.3M vehicles this year, leaving a whopping 30% of its production capacity unused. Beside this decline in sales, Toyoda also lists the Dollar-Yen exchange rate as a source of trouble, saying"When you get to ...

Example of an unsecured driver-side floor mat trapping the accelerator pedal in a 2007 Lexus ES350

In its largest such move in the US ever, Toyota is recalling 3.8 million of its Toyota and Lexus vehicles built between 2004 and 2010. The culprit is a problem with poorly-designed floormats that in some cases, can cause the accelerator pedal to remain pressed down. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), who issued the bulletin, is asking owners of vehicles listed below to remove the driver's side floor mats while Toyota arrives at a solution.
The affected models are ...

Autocar reports that Toyota and BMW are in partnership talks that could see the two distinctly different companies exchanging platforms. Of interest to BMW is the next generation of Toyota's innovative iQ, "the world's smallest four-seat urban city car", which could underpin BMW's planned electric city car. This could see the resurrection of the Isetta brand name of the 1960s.

In return for the iQ chassis, Toyota would get access to the next generation Mini Coupe and Roadster platforms to extend its range of small urban cars.

The BMW tie-up would be the second cross-branding win for ...

In a tit-for-tat response to Honda, who plans to unveil the hybrid CR-Z sports car, Toyota will employ the services of an Italian styling house to build a Prius Coupe. The current Prius will not win any beauty contests, but if Italdesign, Pininfarina or Bertone exercise their design muscles properly, the Prius coupe will be a handsome hybrid.

While it would be great if the final product would look something like these renderings from ...

Surprise, surprise: Lexus takes the top spot in J.D. Power's 2009 Initial Quality Survey, followed by Porsche, Cadillac, Hyundai and Honda.

That Lexus should be at the top is actually not a surprise. In fact, Toyota's products, in Toyota, Lexus and Scion guises, took 10 segment awards, more than any other company. These include, as stated in the J.D. Power press release, 'five for Lexus, four for Toyota and one for Scion. Lexus receives awards for the IS, GS, GX, LS and LX models. The Lexus LX has the fewest quality problems in the industry, with ...

Last month, we brought you the news that the new Honda Insight had claimed the title of best-selling car in Japan, the first time ever that such an honor had gone to a hybrid car. We were curious what would happen when Toyota announced its third-gen Prius, which is a bit more efficient and slightly more expensive.

Well, the Prius has knocked the Insight off its perch for the month of May. In fact, the Insight fell to number 3, below Honda's own Fit.

Aahh....the battle of silent, wheezing electric cars...almost as exciting as a Sunday drag ...

Many of you may not know that Honda was in fact the first manufacturer to offer a hybrid vehicle in the United States. However, perhaps suffering from its slightly impractical body style, the first Insight was not a commercial home run, paving the way for the Toyota claiming all the hybrid goodwill.

Honda recently released its completely redesigned Insight, hoping for better luck this time around. Well, at least in its home market of Japan, the Honda Insight is now the best-selling vehicle, having sold 10,841 units this April. No, not the best-selling ‘hybrid’ in Japan, but in what ...

The 2009 Brand Image Awards by Kelley Blue Book has named BMW the ‘coolest’ car brand, as well as the ‘best performance brand’ and ‘best exterior design brand’. Its arch-rival Mercedes-Benz, was voted as the ‘best prestige brand’.

The full results are as follows:

BMW: coolest
BMW: best performance
BMW: best exterior design - luxury
Cadillac: best comfort
Cadillac: best interior design
Ford: most rugged truck
Mercedez-Benz: most prestige
Nissan: best exterior design – non-luxury
Toyota: best value
Toyota: Most family

So, the question is, which would you rather be: cool, or prestigious? Do you agree with the other awards? Leave your ...

Now, I have to admit I have a soft spot for Toyotas after 145,000 very happy, trouble free miles in my treasured IS300 and know there is a very good reason why Toyota trucks are the transportation of choice for any self-respecting mob of gun-toting freedom fighters in arse-end, war-torn countries (they are almost literally bullet proof and will go on forever, no matter how badly you treat them). But if this is the future of driving, please kill me now!

This is just wrong, so wrong, so very very wrong….get a bloody grip Toyota! If I wanted ...

Welcome to Friday – here’s more bitter news from the car industry. Toyota announced today that its annual loss will be three times larger than what it had previously forecasted. Toyota used to be famous for never incurring an operating loss in its 70-year history, but it expects to lose a staggering $4.95 billion in the year ending March.

We hate to keep reporting such dismal figures, but it is clear that there is a tectonic shift afoot when the bulletproof Toyota can’t shift units.

The company still forecasts a worldwide sales of 7.32 million vehicles for ...

After 77 years of claiming the title of the world's largest automaker based on sales figures, GM has now fallen to number two behind the Japanese giant Toyota. The difference is small, namely a bit over 600,000 units. To give you an idea of the scale of these two companies, Toyota sold 8.97 million vehicles, compared to 8.36 million for GM.

GM may not mind so much because while the psychological boost of being the world's largest car company is not negligible, neither is the intensity of the spotlight, often negative, that comes with the ...