Components of cars

The other day, I had a chance to drive a Crown Royal Saloon, one of the most prestigious cars manufactured by Toyota. In Japan, the cars were advertised on TV sometime ago as “One day, I will own a Crown…”. Targeting a rich middle age population in the country, Toyota was persuading them to purchase the most luxurious cars at the time by planting the image of the “dream car” in people’s minds through TV commercials for a long time. Then because they gave Celsior the status of the flagship sedan (which is now Lexus) Crown was not the most prestigious sedan any longer and the chance of seeing the commercial on TV has got less and less.

However, Crown still had it. First going on the market in 1955, this car has been capturing thousands of fans for more than half a century. Its design, interior, performance and components are all carefully planned to be best suited to the environment of Japan to flaunt Toyota’s high level of technology.

Among the components I quite like is its radar cruise control system which exerts its power on the motorway. It is done by the detection device installed behind the grill that catches information from milliwave radar, etc. and recognises the preceding car and the driving lanes to assist with safe driving. When the car in front of you changes its speed, without you pushing the accelerator pedal, you can follow the car keeping a safe distance within the set speed limit.

Say, you set the cruise control at 100km per hour. You catch up with the preceding car and it is only doing 80km/hour, your car just follows it at the same speed of 80km/hour while keeping a safe distance. If the preceding car changes lane and disappears from the radar, your car speeds back up to 100km/hour. Such a system to assist the driver like this is very useful especially for a long distance drive on a motorway. If you find a driver with good driving habits, just put your car behind him/her and activate your radar cruise control system. You can keep driving without pushing the accelerator pedal and this is great. Your fatigue will be reduced a great deal. Toyota started to install this device to their luxury range of vehicles and now not only Crowns but some new Corolla models have them.

So what sort of new things are installed on cars lately? A Japanese car magazine did a survey on the components drivers think “unnecessary”. The top 10 were as follows:
1. Speed metre which goes beyond 180km/hour
2. Ash tray
3. Cigarette lighter
4. Cigarette socket at the rear seats
5. Plastic which covers all the seats when you purchase a brand new car
6. High engine displacement over 3 litres
7. Dome lights other than white gleam
8. Turbo charger
9. 2 window washers
10. Keys on the petrol caps

For the top one: “Speed metre which goes beyond 180km/hour”, I totally agree because I have never, ever, driven a car anywhere near that speed in Japan. You know, Japan only has a small land mass and there is no long straight motorway like Germany’s Autobahn. There are speed limits on every single road, so if you really do 180km/hour and get caught, you will not only get arrested on the spot or even if you can escape from an arrest, you will lose your driver’s licence straight away. When you think about this, why does a car need a metre like that? Number 2 to 4 are reflecting current tendencies of non-smoking. Less and less people smoke in Japan and in Tokyo and other prefectures you are not allowed to smoke in a taxi. Many people now think “Ash trays” and “Cigarette lighters” are unnecessary. Recently, it is getting more common not to put an ash tray as a standard component for compact cars and mini vans whose target is ladies and families. From 5, unless you are a driver with peculiar tastes, these things are not needed. The results are mirroring society’s view of not manufacturing unwanted things. What do you think?


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955

Visitors to Japan

More and more people visit Japan every year. In fact, I see quite a few non-Japanese buyers at auction sites. Some auction sites have Halal meals and a prayer room for Muslims. Going to Akihabara, a close town from our office, we see lots of foreign visitors. Japan is definitely becoming more international. However, because of the current recession and the high Yen, the absolute numbers of visitors are getting less because a trip to Japan, which used to be not too bad, is now getting more expensive. In the middle of such tough times, there was news on TV about a ski field in Niigata Prefecture doing very well. Although Niseko in Hokkaido and Hakuba in Nagano are leading in popularity, those ski fields are targeting Russia and Eastern Asia, and are spending money on advertisement in the relevant countries and preparing their facilities to welcome visitors from there. I am going to talk about these ski fields in this issue.

At Naeba Ski Resort in Yuzawa-machi, where approximately 1.3 million skiers visit every year, you can hear different languages if you queue up for the lifts. This winter the numbers of the visitors from overseas before the 5th of January are counted at almost 2,800, 1,000 more than the same time last year. Because of cheap Wong, visitors from Korea have decreased and the numbers of Russian skiers were around 900, quite similar figures to last year’s but the numbers of Taiwanese visitors has increased greatly from only 100 last year to almost 1,200 this year. A Russian man was interviewed and was saying “Ski fields in Russia are too cold and have poor accommodation, you know. This is great: plenty of lifts and the services are excellent. Its Onsens are fantastic, too”. The banker was visiting there from Khabarovsk with his family.

About 2 years ago, they started to employ Russian, Chinese and Korean speaking staff and they have the advantage of direct flights from large cities in Eastern Russia such as Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.

Joetsu Kokusai Ski Resort in Minamiuonuma City, holds an annual international skiing competition since 3 years ago and for the week around the 4 day event, about 1,000 visitors from Eastern Asia, Europe and North America come. Their sales point is “not too far from Tokyo metropolitan district and you can combine skiing with a sightseeing tour of the capital of Japan”.

At Myoko City, where there are 9 ski fields, only 100 people visited from overseas 2 years ago but it increased dramatically to 500 last year. This year, its tourism association is expecting around 3,000 estimating from bookings. Niigata prefectural government is strongly supporting these private activities. They invited those in tourism and journalism in Eastern Asia and took them to the ski fields as well as introducing the Japanese culture of Onsen and food. “Niigata is not well-known as a tourist spot yet but our advertisement seems to be working gradually”, said their spokesman. With lots of hope, they are continuing to try attracting foreign tourists for a while.

Most news lately is about the recession and the high Yen and not much good news but I feel great to hear many people still visit here in this tough time and they are feeling good about our country.

We have our office in Tokyo. If you come to one of the ski fields, please come and visit us on the way to your sightseeing tour of the capital city.


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955

New Toyota Prius

Suffering from the lack of new car sales worldwide, at Toyota, about 2200 employees at the managerial level are planning to purchase a new Toyota car before the end of March. This is “not on a mandatory basis but on a voluntary basis” and there is no restriction on types of cars or price ranges. Originally some CEOs decided this at their discretion but some managing directors and other executives joined in. A few of them have already bought the latest “IQ” which just went on the market last year or their compact car “Vitz” and some have even bought 2 new cars.

One of the CEOs said: “Unless we use our cars ourselves, we cannot fully appreciate them, we cannot recommend them to others either”. He was emphasizing that they are doing it to help sales recover but it also helps to share the feeling of the crisis together

By the way, I have a friend who works at “Sharp” the electrical appliance manufacturer. About 20 years ago while the company was struggling in business, he received a “voucher” to buy their own products instead of the usual bonus payment. Around that time, without any strong selling goods, Sharp was ranked lower than Toshiba, Sonny and Matsushita (Panasonic); then they made their name in flat-screen liquid-crystal products. Look at them now. Letting their employees buy their own products might work towards sales recovery.

In the meantime, Toyota officially unveiled their new Prius at last. They channelled all the company’s energies in it. In the hybrid system, almost 90% of the components were newly developed and the engine size was grown from 1.5L to 1.8L. Because the engine displacement was low, it used to give the drivers a headache when its engine revved faster and raised the fuel consumption at high speed. This was solved by expanding the engine displacement to keep the engine revs low to improve fuel consumption at high speed.

At the same time, the motor performance has been improved with maximum output of 80ps (58.8kW) raised by 12ps and with a maximum torque of 21.2kg-m (208N-m). The same as the previous model, it uses a Nickel-metal hybrid battery as the secondary battery. It was said that “the power this engine and the electric motor produce together is as powerful as a 2.4L petrol engine”.

The new Prius has 3 different driving modes: “EV Drive Mode” uses only its electric motor to reach zero emission, “Power Mode” is for a sporty run using the engine and “Eco Mode” is for reducing fuel consumption. I cannot wait till they finally go on the market in April.

There was usually only Prius when it came to hybrid cars, but now Honda has introduced “Incite”. This is Honda’s first hybrid car and it is obvious they thought about the Prius a lot in its development. Pricewise it is going to be under JPY 2,000,000, JPY 400,000 cheaper than the Prius. The mileage will be quite similar at 30.0km/L. Its design is incredibly similar to Prius, I have to admit. From this Spring, we might see tough competition between these two latest cars.


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955

New-car sales in 2008

The other day, I found the last year’s new car sales ranking in the newspaper. It has been sluggish for a while but Toyota Prius, alleged to have high fuel performance was ranked in 5th, which was the first time it ranked in the top 10 since it went on the market in 1997.

Toyota sold 73,110 Prius, which was a 25% increase on the previous year. It was ranked in 22nd in 2006, 11th in 2007. The numbers were increasing steadily every year and this year, it made substantial progress in sales while Toyota is planning a full-model change this Spring. This was a bit of a surprise for us in the auto business. Honestly speaking, I always thought that hybrid cars are too much more expensive than normal cars to limit the buyers but now it is in the top 10 ranking, which means it must have captured most of the car users needs.

As hybrid cars are still expensive, most of us have to think again when it comes to buying one, last year’s high petrol cost might have helped to push their sales. When you choose a hybrid car, you usually calculate how much you can save in petrol cwhen onsidering the extra cost to buy one. Until last year, there was not enough point buying one when the petrol price was stable to get much advantage but when the petrol price shot up last year, people must have thought the difference was good enough to consider buying one.

From this Spring in Japan, the government is going to lower the tax on hybrid cars. This is expected to provide better conditions for hybrid car sales and other car manufacturers are also starting to sell hybrid models from next month. If it brings competition and record high sales in hybrid cars, the car prices will be dropped so that consumers feel that they are getting a bargain.

Also, Honda’s compact car Fit got back to the top after a 6 year break. Thanks to the full-model change in October 2007, even in monthly bases, it has been on the top for 10 months with only a few losses when Toyota Corolla took the premium place in October & November. Having test driven a Fit, although not as good as Prius, you can see that it is very economical and because of the body size, it is easy to drive around. It surely is value for money. Until 2007, Toyota Corolla was struggling for sales of 2% less than the year before. The ranking was as follows:

New-Car Sales ranking (2008)

(Name of Car)　　　　(Numbers of Sales, Year-on-year rate%)
======================================================
1.　　　Honda Fit　　　　　　　174,914 (50.1)
2.　　　Toyota Corolla　　　　144,051 (▲2.1)
3.　　　Toyota Vitz　　　　　　123,337 (1.6)
4.　　　Toyota Crown　　　　74,904 (32.7)
5.　　　Toyota Prius　　　　　73,110 (25.4)
6.　　　Nissan Selena　　　　  72,927 (▲6.0)
7.　　　Toyota Passo　　　　　72,767 (▲9.1)
8.　　　Toyota Voxy　　　　　70,165 (▲4.5)
9.　　　Nissan Tiida　　　　　 65,302 (4.9)
10.　　Mazda Demio　　　　　64,990 (▲0.8)



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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955

New!! Yahoo Auction Agent Service

New!! Yahoo Auction Agent Service

We hope you are enjoying your holidays and have had an amazing start to the New Year. Year 2009 has started and I am wondering what sort of the year it is going to be.

Last year was a leap year and we had the Olympics, US presidential election and the worldwide economic turmoil started with the financial crisis in the USA. This crisis even affected countries such as Europe and Japan which have no direct connection to sub-prime loans and it does not look like to be ending soon. It is really serious in the automobile industry that we are in. It started with the US’ Big Three and now Toyota plunged into the red for the first time in history. We cannot see the bottom of this yet.

In Japan, manufacturing companies are cancelling their contracts with temporary workers from agencies when they had to close their factories down for a while. Thousands of people started looking for new jobs, which is the biggest social issue at the moment. I have never watched such a scene on TV, people are struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis in this particular country: so I guess it is a depression era which only comes every 100 years.

However, we cannot blame everything on this. We are going to forge a solid footing in our business by providing excellent service and creating new business models. As the first “new” service for the year, we are now ready to assist you to get what you want from “Yahoo Auction”.

Yahoo Auction, affiliated company of the US Yahoo, is an on-line auction site run by Yahoo Japan Co. Ltd. I did mention this when I wrote about how to buy used cars in Japan but this time we have developed the translated site in English and Russian so you now do not have to try translating it by yourself. You can order from our website for us to bid on your behalf. I am sure you will like this convenience.

In the USA, “Ebay” is the most popular but in Japan, it is “Yahoo Auction”. Although Ebay tried to break into the Japanese market, Yahoo Auction had such a big presence Ebay had to pull back because of Yahoo’s unbeatable popularity. On Yahoo Japan, individual members and shops who pay monthly subscriptions can freely list items on the internet and others buy them by auction. (Some items also have a “Buy Now” function.) Not for my business but for my personal use, I have been buying a book shelf, computer software, car parts, etc. through them. I admit I am a heavy user. Some items are listed from US$1 and compared with car prices, they are heaps cheaper per item; so you can try it easily. Most items which individual members list are in excellent conditions and reasonably priced and some of them can be quite rare. I think Japanese people have stopped wasting materials. You might find some good bargains there, so please have a look. You never know!

http://yahoo.jpctrade.com/yahoo?site=http://jpctrade.com

To use our Yahoo Auction Agent Service, customers are required to pay a bit more than the total cost of the bidding price and other costs (JPC’s fees, postage in Japan and to your place by EMS), in advance. On Yahoo Auction, different sellers have different conditions and costs of freight will depend on where they live; so we will estimate it roughly at first and re-calculate the actual cost after successful bids and any difference will be shown on your “My Page” of our website as “Balance”. If it is refund, you can use it when you use this service again; otherwise we will send it back to you using Paypal.

When you buy a car from us and if you buy parts from Yahoo Auction, we can send the parts with the document to save the total freight cost. One of our customers in Russia started this business over there and is making more than US$50,000/month. We have some large companies trying to franchise representative service business in Japan. I think it has a big potential in the future.

For dealers who are struggling to survive the recession because you cannot sell as many cars to make a profit, this site will be useful to start a side business. Or you can just use the service to get what you want as an individual. Please give it a try. Also if you find anything inconvenient, hard-to-use on the website or any suggestions, please let us know. We always appreciate feedback from you.



★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955