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Lexus in no hurry to be a big player in China

For a while now, China's spiraling wealth, population and development has had the world's luxury automakers in an expansionist fervor, with many executives exhibiting the sort of gleefully maniacal behavior historically reserved for gold-rush prospectors. Yet Toyota, of all companies, is exercising a surprising amount of caution in the Asian nation.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, Toyota's premium brand, Lexus, sold all of 64,000 vehicles in China last year, while BMW cleared its books of 326,000. In fact, it didn't even bother entering the market until 2005, while rival Audi built its first car in the market a decade and a half earlier. Even now, Lexus doesn't build any vehicles in China, and with the country's notoriously high tariffs on imports, that's a major disadvantage. Yet the business daily quotes Lexus executive vice president Mark Templin as saying that the brand is nowhere near ready to start building cars in the market. "We're not having those discussions about when we're going to go to China... We have a lot of work to do before we get to that point."
Part of that work includes establishing a more expansive dealer network - Lexus only had 99 stores as of 2012, while rival Mercedes-Benz had over two-and-a-half times as many, and it's still expanding. Adding a lot of dealers without having a goodly number of competitively priced offerings for them to sell may seem like an odd strategy, but Templin tells the WSJ that the goal is to "cultivate our image for quality and customer service and let the customers that we have go tell that story for us."

Lexus leads J.D. Power's Vehicle Dependability Study for 2021

J.D. Power's latest Vehicle Dependability Study is out, and, not surprisingly, Lexus sits at the top for the ninth time in the last 10 years. Right behind Lexus is Porsche, followed by Kia, which is the highest-ranked mass-market brand in the study. Genesis, last year's top-ranked brand (in its first year included in the results), fell from first to eighth, though the G80 sedan did earn an award in its midsize luxury segment. The Porsche 911 was called out as the Most Dependable Model by J.D. Power for the second time in the last three years. The vehicles being studied are from the 2018 model year, which means owners have had three years to get to know their cars and trucks. It's notable that this year's study shows a marked improvement in overall vehicle dependability as tracked by J.D. Power. The overall level of problems, scored by the number of problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), declined by 10% compared to last year.  "The study results validate what we have known for some time," said Dave Sargent, vice president of global automotive at J.D. Power. "Automakers are making increasingly dependable vehicles — but there are still some problem areas that need to be addressed and some warning signs on the horizon." Tesla makes its inaugural appearance on the Dependability Study, though its score of 176 PP100 isn't official. Tesla is the only automaker that has chosen not to grant J.D. Power permission to survey its owners in all 50 states. As we've pointed out in the past, the Vehicle Dependability Study includes eight major vehicle categories grouped by J.D. Power as follows: audio/communication/entertainment/navigation (ACEN); engine/transmission; exterior; interior; features/controls/displays (FCD); driving experience; heating, ventilation and air conditioning; and seats. All issues reported by owners are all tracked equally, which means a problematic phone pairing procedure dings an automaker's rating the same as a blown engine or transmission. And in fact, the ACEN category has more reported problems than any other, which means the majority of problems reported don't lead to a vehicle that leaves its owner stranded. Green Land Rover Lexus Porsche Car Buying JD Power dependability reliability

Toyota settles first wrongful death suit related to unintended acceleration

Toyota's sales seem to have rebounded from the unintended acceleration issues from 2009 and 2010, but the automaker is far from done dealing with this situation. Following a settlement worth up to $1.4 billion for economic loss to affected vehicle owners, Toyota has settled rather than going to trial in a wrongful death lawsuit stemming from an accident in Utah in 2010 that left two passengers dead. This isn't the first case in which Toyota has settled, but it was the first among a consolidated group of cases being held in Santa Ana, CA.
According to The Detroit News, this case was scheduled to take place next month, and it was for a November 2010 incident in which Paul Van Alfen and Charlene James Lloyd were killed in a Camry when, based on findings by the Utah Highway Patrol, the accelerator got stuck causing the car to speed out of control and hit a wall; the terms of the settlement were not announced.
The article says that while Toyota will settle on some cases, it doesn't plan on settling on all of them as it still wants to be able to "defend [its] product at trial." This will probably be the case in suits claiming that software for the drive-by-wire accelerator was the cause of an accident in a Toyota or Lexus vehicle. The question of whether or not the electronic accelerator played any role in this problem has been a hot-button topic since the beginning. Toyota has issued recalls in the past to attempt to prevent unintended acceleration caused by trapped floor mats and faulty accelerator pedals, but it also says driver error was to blame in some instances.