The car was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show last week, but until recently the company insisted that the compact hybrid would only be sold in Europe. According to Automotive News, Lexus executives pleaded with Japan to bring to the car to the US—partly in hopes that the smaller Lexus would appeal to a younger demographic. “When the all-new Lexus CT 200h enters the market it will be the only hybrid vehicle in the emerging premium compact segment,” said Mark Templin, Lexus Division group vice president and general manager.
“There are no plans, at present, to bring this vehicle to the U.S.,” said Toyota spokesman Curt McAllister in response to an e-mail query from IL.
The hybrid is expected to go on sale in Europe, but Lexus has yet to spell out a timetable for launch of what it calls “a new gateway model” to Toyota’s upscale brand.
Few details were released about the CT 200h, with Lexus only saying that it will be equipped with second-generation Lexus Hybrid Drive technology. The teaser image shows a vehicle that seems to put a premium on curves and high style, at least judging from the rear-end shot.
CT 200h will make its US debut at the 2010 New York Auto Show later this month. Production begins in late 2010. The car could go on sale in the US sometime in 2011.
The company has not published performance details, but they do say that the motor is “powerful.” Nickel-metal hydride is used for the high voltage battery. Power is sent to the front wheels via a electrically-controlled contiuously variable transmission, or E-CVT for short.
The car remains a sleek five-door, just like the concept. It has sporty overhangs at the front and back, and a well-placed rear spoiler. The car looks to have LED rear lighting. At 4,320mm long, the car is 140mm shorter than the Toyota Prius. The Lexus is 1,765mm wide by 1,430mm high; 20mm x 50mm less than the Prius. It rides on 17-inch alloy wheels, and features McPherson/front- and double wishbone rear suspension.
Lexus wants to use this car to prove that full hybrids do not have to be boring drives. They claim the car has “superior handling agility” to suit their customers’ wishes, and three driving modes (Eco, Normal, and Sport) to adjust to different situations. Again, Lexus remained vague about sprint times, overtake ability, and top speed.
Crack the secret code of how IT departments really work and what makes IT professionals tick.
Why can’t operational managers ever get what they really want from IT? Why is the relationship so fraught with frustration from all parties? IT managers and business leaders simply don’t understand each other, the way they think, the pressures they face and the goals they are trying to achieve. Enter Susan Cramm, the prospective Deborah Tannen of the Business-IT relationship.
Personality-wise, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then the IT people are from Microsoft and their business partners are from Apple. In spite of great effort to become more business-smart, line and IT managers have very different backgrounds and experiences which make it difficult to communicate what they do and why and how they do it. Different pressures and incentives further increase the difficulty of forming positive IT-business relationships. While line managers need to ‘get ‘er done now’ to support the needs of their function or units (or pay the price in terms of near term business results and bonuses), IT managers need to ‘get ‘er done right’ to support the longer term needs of the enterprise (or pay the price in terms of fragmented, fragile systems.)
The key to reconciling these and other differences is to figure out how to manage the paradox. If you want to get what you want from IT, you need to shift your perspective and look through the eyes of your IT partners. Doing so will allow you to develop a single version of ‘truth’ and give you the insight necessary to change the relationship for the better.
Similarly, this book will help dispel the notion that managers can ‘hand off’ their IT responsibility to the IT organization and will provide the tools to incorporate the management of IT into their daily leadership agenda and repertoire. Business leaders should assume accountability for IT, much as they have assumed accountability for the management of the financial and human resource asset and build the necessary capabilities into their organization.
The core ideas in this book also promise to have applicability to managing other relationships between business units and specialized service providers. Think supply-chain management, or better yet, graphic design.
About the Author
Susan Cramm is the founder and president of Valuedance. Susan Cramm is a recognized industry expert on information technology leadership. She has helped pioneer the field of IT leadership coaching through her passion and gifts for developing others, as well as her keen insights regarding IT leadership, which are derived from extensive research and years serving in executive level positions. She has worked with executives from a number of Fortune Global 200 clients, including Toyota, Sony and Time Warner. Susan’s experience makes a difference and her clients describe her as ‘insightful’, ‘motivational’, ‘practical’, ‘tough’, ‘committed’ and ‘invaluable’. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and, since 2000, has authored the monthly “Executive Coach” column for CIO magazine.
Susan is the former CFO and executive vice president at Chevy’s Mexican Restaurants. She joined Chevy’s in 1994 to assist in the development of a nationwide Mexican ‘cantina style’ restaurant concept and assumed responsibility for finance, business strategy, restaurant development, franchising and legal functions. Prior to Chevy’s, Cramm worked with the Taco Bell Corporation and held the positions of CIO and vice president of the Information Technology Group and Senior Director for Financial and Strategic Planning.
Susan received her master’s degree in management from Northwestern University, specializing in finance, marketing and quantitative methods and her BA from University California, San Diego, summa cum laude, specializing in management and computer science.
Mace Engineering Group was started in 2006 .MACE Engineering Group are an aftermarket performance parts company designing performance parts for holdens,fords,nissans and toyota’s. And now distributes to major companies and sells all around the world.
At Mace Engineering Group we pride ourselves on quality aftermarket parts and the excellent service that we provide to all of our customers. We understand that all of our customers have different needs and we strive to provide them with exactly what they need.
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Toyota and Exponent have provided Professor David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University with the results of their thorough evaluations of his demonstration of apparent “unintended acceleration” in Toyota and Lexus vehicles as described in his Preliminary Report and in his testimony at recent Congressional hearings. In evaluating Professor Gilbert’s claims, Exponent also analyzed the footage of Professor Gilbert’s appearance on ABC News on February 22, 2010.
Toyota has also supplied the results of these evaluations to the appropriate Congressional Committees. The analysis of Professor’s Gilbert’s demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory. There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world. As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.
Toyota Evaluates Unintended Acceleration Complaints in Remedied Vehicles
Brake Override System Operation Explained
TORRANCE, Calif., March 4, 2010 – Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc., has received verifiable information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about some vehicles whose owners have reported unintended acceleration after receiving the accelerator pedal recall remedies. As soon as Toyota received the vehicle owner information from NHTSA, it moved quickly to evaluate the vehicles and interview the owners.
Although most of these reports have yet to be verified, Toyota has been and remains committed to investigating all reported incidents of sudden acceleration in its vehicles quickly. Toyota wants to hear directly from its customers about any problems they are experiencing with their vehicles.
The results of the evaluations have been submitted to NHTSA for review. Though these reports involve a tiny fraction of the more than one million vehicles dealers have repaired to date, Toyota takes them extremely seriously.
As NHTSA is now reviewing the results of our evaluations, it is inappropriate for Toyota to provide specific information about the company’s conclusions. However, the evaluations have found no evidence of a failure of the vehicle electronic throttle control system, the recent recall remedies or the brake override system.
It is important to note that many complaints submitted to NHTSA either are unverifiable or lack the vehicle owner information required to facilitate follow-up. Nonetheless, Toyota is quickly investigating verifiable complaints of unintended acceleration and doing everything it can to ensure that our customers are confident in their vehicles and the remedies.
About the Brake Override System
The brake override system is designed to stop the vehicle when the brake pedal is firmly pressed in cases in which acceleration is caused by mechanical interference with the accelerator pedal.
However, if the brake pedal is released, while there is still mechanical interference with the pedal, the vehicle may again accelerate. Therefore, once the vehicle brought to a safe stop, the transmission gear selector should be put into neutral or park position before turning off the engine. In this case, drivers are asked to contact their nearest Toyota dealer.
For practical reasons, the brake override system does not engage if the brake pedal is pressed before the accelerator pedal. For example, this allows for vehicles starting on a steep hill to safely accelerate without rolling backwards. Also, while the brake override system is engaged, if the brake pedal is released or if the accelerator pedal moves more than a certain amount, the brake override system will disengage in order to give precedence to the driver intention.
The brake override system does not engage when the vehicle moves at speeds less than approximately five miles per hour, at which point the vehicle can be stopped safely.
Good to be home, I’m Jay Leno, your host… at least for a while.
I’m a little bit nervous, not because it’s my first day back, but because Dave and Oprah are watching…
We’ve been off for the last few weeks, bit like the Russians at the (Winter) Olympics…
We’ve got Lindsay Vonn on the show tonight, when it comes to going downhill no-one is faster… Except NBC
President Bush said today that he often turned to prayer during his presidency. Hey, I think we all turned to prayer during his presidency.
Keanu Reeves will star in “Speed 3.” The first “Speed” was about a runaway bus, the second was about a boat, and the third one is going to be about a Toyota.
Gatorade has officially ended their relationship with Tiger Woods. He was seeing at least five other sports drinks.
The last two weeks have seen an avalanche of negative headlines for Toyota. A sampling below:
On February 23, 2010, Jim Lentz, Toyota’s President of U.S. Sales, admitted during questioning before the House Energy and Commerce Panel that it was “probably fair to say” that the company may not know the cause of unintended acceleration in as many as 70 percent of customer complaints.
On February 24, 2010, Akio Toyoda–Toyota’s President and the grandson of the company’s founder–told the House Oversight and Government Committee that he didn’t learn about unintended acceleration problems in Toyota vehicles until late 2009, and claimed that he wasn’t aware of a July 2009 internal memo that bragged about $100 million in savings on recalls. The plausibility of his professed ignorance was called into question when Lentz testified before Congress that decisions about important safety issues like recalls were all made in Japan–an admission at odds with Toyota’s efforts to portray itself as a company solidly rooted in the U.S.
On February 26, 2010, Bloomberg News reported that the same memo characterized Toyota’s success in blocking a formal recall of Sienna minivans as a “win” for the company. The problem with the Siennas involved collapsing liftgates that led to 98 reported injuries. Toyota persuaded the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to close its investigation by sending a letter to Sienna owners offering to replace defective struts on the liftgate.
On March 2, 2010, USA Today/Gallup released results of a survey that showed that 31% of Americans now believe Toyota and Lexus vehicles are unsafe to drive, and 55% believe the carmaker dragged its feet in responding to potential safety defects.
Also on March 2, 2010, the New York Times reported that Camrys manufactured before 2007–which were not subject to Toyota’s recent recalls–were the subject of hundreds of unintended acceleration complaints. Toyota did not recall the pre-2007 Camrys because they use a different gas pedal and different floor mats than later models. However, the complaints about pre-2007 Camrys suggests that unintended acceleration may be caused by problems with the electronic throttle system and not defective gas pedals or floor mats.
On March 3, 2010, the Associated Press reported that NHTSA continued to receive complaints of unintended acceleration from Toyota owners whose cars had been repaired. The continued problems suggest that unintended acceleration is caused by problems with the electronic throttle system, something Toyota has repeatedly denied. Toyota has attributed the problems to defective gas pedals and floor mats, and its fixes have focused on swapping out floor mats, replacing and modifying pedals and removing floor padding. NHTSA has asked Toyota owners who continue to experience unintended acceleration post-repairs to contact the agency.
On February 24, 2010, the New York Times reported that Toyota is facing a revolt from its suppliers, who have been frustrated in recent years by Toyota’s efforts to squeeze prices despite rising production costs. The recall crisis has led the traditionally loyal suppliers to break rank and speak out against the company. The owner of one supplier, Teruo Moewaki, became a local celebrity by saying on television he would no longer accept orders from the embattled manufacturer.
8 Things We Hate About IT
