Toyota and Suzuki are teaming up to catch up in the global EV race. Next year, Suzuki will supply Toyota with its first electric SUV, which is set to roll out worldwide. Here’s what to expect from Toyota’s new electric SUV.
Toyota’s electric SUV from Suzuki is coming in 2025
Suzuki will begin producing the new all-electric SUV for Toyota at its Gujarat plant in India starting in the spring of 2025.
The new EV is the first of an expanding partnership as the Japanese automakers look to fend off the wave of new models hitting the market. In a press release on Wednesday, Toyota and Suzuki said the new SUV was designed “exclusively as a BEV,” eliminating gas or hybrid options.
The statement said Toyota’s new EV will be “a nimble SUV with the sharp driving characteristics of a BEV.”
It will be powered by a platform co-developed by Suzuki, Toyota, and Daihatsu Motor, combining each other’s advantages.
Toyota’s president, Koji Sato, said, “By leveraging the BEV unit and platform that we jointly developed, we will take a new step in our collaboration in the field of electrified vehicles.”
The electric SUV will be available in 4WD, “offering exceptional drivability on rough roads and a more powerful driving experience.”
Earlier this year, Maruti Suzuki unveiled the Concept Electric SUV eVX, a mid-size electric SUV with a driving range of up to 342 miles (550 km). This gave us a glimpse of what the new model will likely look like.
At 4,300 mm long, 1,800 mm wide, and 1,600 mm tall, the eVX is slightly slammer than BYD’s popular Atto 3 (4,455 mm long x 1,875 mm wide x 1,615 mm tall) or a Toyota Crolla Cross (4,460 mm long, 1,825 mm wide, 1,620 mm tall).
Toyota said it would launch the new model “worldwide” as one of the ten EVs due out by 2026. According to a Nikkei report earlier this month, Toyota is also deepening its partnership with Subaru with plans to launch another co-developed electric SUV in 2026.
Subaru announced it was teaming up with Toyota to launch three new electric SUVs by 2026. The company’s CEO, Atsushi Osaki, said, “There is a huge risk for us to go it alone in this field.”
Electrek’s Take
Japan’s leading automakers are teaming up to launch new electric models as lower-priced models from China continue to gain market share.
With China’s EV market, the world’s largest, becoming saturated with new models, automakers are taking business overseas to drive growth.
One of the most notable is China’s largest automaker, BYD. BYD just posted record profits as vehicle sales continued surging in the third quarter. BYD’s revenue outpaced Tesla for the first time (including PHEV sales).
Meanwhile, Toyota’s output fell for the first time in four years in the first half of fiscal 2024. Toyota especially felt the heat in China, with volume slipping by 17%.
Toyota sold 108,287 EVs through the first nine months of 2024, including its luxury brand Lexus. That’s only about 1.5% of the over 7.4 million vehicles sold then. BYD sold 164,956 EVs in September alone, with nearly 1.2 million sold through September.
Can Toyota fend off the competition with the help of Suzuki and Subaru? Comment below and let us know your thoughts.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to officially join Trump’s administration as the co-head of the new US Department of Government Efficiency – a second federal department with the goal of making government spending more efficient.
You can’t get more ironic than that.
Throughout the elections, Musk, who is already CEO of Tesla, and SpaceX, a well as the defacto head of X, xAI, Neuralink, and the Boring Company, has been floating the idea to add to his workload by joining the Trump’s administration to lead a new department aimed at making the federal government more efficient.
He has been calling it the “Department of Government Efficiency”, which spells out ‘DOGE’, a meme that Musk appears to enjoy.
Well, now Trump appears to want to be going through with this idea.
He announced the new department and Musk as head, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, in a statement today:
I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”). Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the “Save America” Movement. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” stated Mr. Musk.
What’s most ironic is that there’s already a federal department with the goal of cutting government waste and ensuring efficiency: the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO’s main objectives are:
auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively;
investigating allegations of illegal and improper activities;
reporting on how well government programs and policies are meeting their objectives;
performing policy analyses and outlining options for congressional consideration;
issuing legal decisions and opinions;
advising Congress and the heads of executive agencies about ways to make government more efficient and effective
It sounds similar to what Musk described when talking about his DOGE, but Trump hasn’t gone into many details other than it will “cut waste.”
He also has a confusing message as he compares the initiative, which is supposed to cut government spending, to “The Manhattan project”, a massive and expensive government project.
Trump said that DOGE will help the government “drive large scale structural reform”:
It will become, potentially, “The Manhattan Project” of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of “DOGE” for a very long time. To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.
The statement also noted that DOGE will only operate until July 4, 2026.
Musk has previously claimed that he could cut at least $2 trillion dollars of the $6.5 trillion dollar US federal budget.
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A pump jack in Midland, Texas, US, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024.
Anthony Prieto | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oil prices may see a drastic fall in the event that oil alliance OPEC+ unwinds its existing output cuts, said market watchers who are predicting a bearish year ahead for crude.
“There is more fear about 2025’s oil prices than there has been since years — any year I can remember, since the Arab Spring,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at OPIS, an oil price reporting agency.
“You could get down to $30 or $40 a barrel if OPEC unwound and didn’t have any kind of real agreement to rein in production. They’ve seen their market share really dwindle through the years,” Kloza added.
A decline to $40 a barrel would mean around a 40% erasure of current crude prices. Global benchmark Brent is currently trading at $72 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures are around $68 per barrel.
Oil prices year-to-date
Given that oil demand growth next year probably won’t be much more than 1 million barrels a day, a full unwinding of OPEC+ supply cuts in 2025 would “undoubtedly see a very steep slide in crude prices, possibly toward $40 a barrel,” Henning Gloystein, head of energy, climate and resources at Eurasia Group, told CNBC.
Similarly, MST Marquee’s senior energy analyst Saul Kavonic posited that should OPEC+ unwind cuts without regard to demand, it would “effectively amount to a price war over market share that could send oil to lows not seen since Covid.”
However, the alliance is more likely to opt for a gradual unwinding early next year, compared to a full scale and immediate one, the analysts said.
Should the producers group proceed with their production plan, the market surplus could nearly double.
Martoccia Francesco
Energy strategist at Citi
The oil cartel has been exercising discipline in maintaining its voluntary output cuts, to the point of extending them.
In September, OPEC+ postponed plans to begin gradually rolling back on the 2.2 million barrels per day of voluntary cuts by two months in an effort to stem the slide of oil prices. The 2.2 million bpd cut, which was implemented over the second and third quarters, had been due to expire at the end of September.
At the start of this month, the oil cartel again decided to delay the planned oil output increase by another month to the end of December.
Oil prices have been weighed by a sluggish post-Covid recovery in demand from China, the world’s second-largest economy and leading crude oil importer. In its monthly report released Tuesday, OPEC lowered its 2025 global oil demand growth forecast from 1.6 million barrels per day to 1.5 million barrels per day.
The pressured prices were also conflagrated by a perceivably oversupplied market, especially as key oil producers outside the OPEC alliance like the U.S., Canada, Guyana and Brazil are also planning to add supply, Gloystein highlighted.
Bearish year ahead for oil
The market consensus is that there’ll be a “substantial” oil stock build next year, said Citibank energy strategist Martoccia Francesco.
“Should the producers group proceed with their production plan, the market surplus could nearly double… reaching as much as 1.6 million barrels per day,” said Francesco.
Even if OPEC+ doesn’t unwind the cuts, the future ofl prices is still looking break. Citi analysts expect Brent price to average $60 per barrel next year.
Further fueling the bearish outlook is the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, whose return is associated by some with a potential trade war, said analysts who spoke to CNBC.
“If we do get a trade war — and a lot of economists think that a trade war is possible, and particularly against China — we could see much, much lower prices,” said OPIS’ Kloza.
For that to happen to retail gasoline prices, oil would need to drop to “below $40” per barrel, said Matt Smith, Kpler’s lead oil analyst.
Right now, retail gasoline prices are at a “sweet spot” at $3 per gallon, where consumers do not feel the pinch and input prices are still sufficiently high for producers, Smith added.