Comments by "Yo2" (@yo2trader539) on "Untamed Motors" channel.

  1. The average age of cars and light trucks in the US is 12.6 years in 2024. So there will be a steady replacement demand. The pandemic had constrained supply-chains and production, limited new car availability, resulting in inflated used car prices. With productions now normalized, the price distortion that occurred in certain models will likely change too.
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  2. Toyota is an extremely conservative company even within Japanese standards. So whatever US operations is doing is not ordered from HQ. As for optimization of global production, it's a complicated maze. Contrary to perception, it's rarely about labor costs. Nobody at Toyota lost employment over this move. It's closely linked to supply-chain networks, as well as creating additional capacity for new vehicles. Toyota's production plants world-wide have extremely high utilization. Meaning, they need to carefully plan and move production around their plants to create time and space for retooling and retraining. If I understand correctly, they wanted to move production of Tacoma from Texas to Mexico, because they wanted moved certain models from Indiana to Texas. It's a gigantic puzzle. And I can find article dating back to Jan 2020 on this move. They cannot just do this in a few months, they have to prepare for years to move production of one model from one plant to another.
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  3. Toyota actually lost money in North American business in FY2022. In other words, Toyota was selling their cars way too low in North America relative to their cost base. They now manufacture most of their cars for US market in North America, so Toyota is also exposed to inflationary pressure in the US. A huge portion of increased Toyota profit is coming from USD/JPY currency fluctuation. Due to pandemic policies and war, everything is more expensive from shipping, steel, labor cost, components, semiconductors etc.
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  4.  @ThuongNguyen-rb5kr  Toyota has a good credit rating because those "debts" are not really debts. They are not debts for manufacturing cars, rather it's coming from the financing business. Simply put, when a car loan is approved to a customer, Toyota's financial subsidiary "borrows" the money from capital market so they can "lend" to their customers. Thus, the more vehicles sales, the "debt" size will increase.
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  5.  @NVRAMboi  Please don't blame Toyota or Nissan or Honda. US dealerships are independently owned by AMERICANS. Japanese automakers sell to AMERICAN dealerships, who then sell to their customers. In Japan (and perhaps some countries like Australia), the dealership is owned by the automaker itself. So the price of the vehicle is set by the automaker and not the dealer.
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  6. Considering 20% inflation in the past 5 years, the price sounds reasonable.
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