2012 Toyota Tundra on 2040-cars

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New version of Toyota FT-1 Concept gets racy for Gran Turismo 6

Gran Turismo 6 has been the preferred marketing springboard for quite a few brands and concept cars since its debut last winter. Specifically the GT Vision concept idea - allowing manufacturers a built-in place to offer up new, original, drivable content - has enticed the likes of Mercedes, Nissan, Volkswagen, Toyota and more to dream big on the digital stage before pulling the sheets back on real concept cars.
In fact, Toyota teamed its live reveal of the FT-1 Concept at the Detroit Auto Show with an in-game launch of the car, just this past January. Looking for a second bite at the GT6 apple, Toyota has just released a teaser video for a new, FT-1 Vision GT version of the same concept.
The company isn't giving us much to go on save for the 30-second video, saying only that the concept was penned by Toyota's Calty Design Research team in California, and that it will "soon be available for download." By the looks of it, the new FT-1 seems to be more of a racecar than the original, without obvious changes to the basic form. No word on whether or not there's a physical concept car in the offing at a yet-to-be-named auto show. Stay tuned.

Toyota NA CEO says his excitement for hydrogen sedan is rising

Toyota has an undeniable vested interest in seeing its hydrogen sedan succeed when it goes on sale in the US next year, so it's no surprise that the company's North American CEO, Jim Lentz, says that he's got more hope for the car now than ever before. And if we remember ways that others in the company, like Bob Carter, have loudly sung hydrogen's praises, we have to assume that positivity is running awful high in Torrance. In fact, Lentz said that the US side of the company is far more excited by the H2 car than colleagues in Japan. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, CA this week, Lentz said: After we've seen the product, understand its range, its driving dynamics, its refueling, we're a lot more bullish than Japan - probably about fivefold more bullish. It's just a question of how many can be produced now. Well, we've driven this car, and we still feel that Toyota is placing a big bet on the technology. One important issue is cost, but Lentz would not say exactly how much the car costs to make or what it will be priced at. He did say, though, that the production cost has dropped by 95 percent from the $1 million price tag the car wore ten years ago. That hints at a production cost of around $50,000. Lentz also said he thinks it will take at least a decade for hydrogen vehicles to hit sales of 500,000 per year in the US. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: Their acceptance could get off to a quicker start than the hybrids did. I think you're going to see a lot more marketing of the concept of fuel cell much sooner than you did for hybrids, because basically the whole industry is behind it.

Toyota expands airbag recall to 2.27M vehicles worldwide

Was your Toyota inspected under the company's recall campaign for faulty airbag inflators last year? You might have another trip ahead to have it repaired again. The automotive giant says that it found "the involved serial numbers provided by the supplier were incomplete, and did not include all of the potentially involved inflators," according to its official announcement. That means more replacements are needed.
Toyota's April 2013 inflator recall covered the Corolla, Matrix and Tundra from the 2003 and 2004 model years, the Sequoia from 2002 to 2004 and the Lexus SC 430 from 2002 to 2004. At the time, the company said it would need to inspect about 510,000 vehicles in the US but only expected to replace around 170,000 inflators.
However, the latest announcement increases that figure to about 766,300 vehicles in the US. Toyota spokesperson Cindy Knight told Autoblog that the new amount is the combination of owners who need to have their vehicle looked at again and those who didn't come in for the initial recall. The company learned about the problem when Takata, the supplier, provided it with an improved list of the faulty part's serial numbers. According to The Detroit News, the latest recall affects about 2.27 million vehicles from them worldwide. Knight said owners would receive notification of the problem around the end of the month but repairs would come in phases because the automaker doesn't have all of the necessary parts at the moment.