Flint: Your GM Questions Answered by Jerry Flint (11/21/2005)
There's a lot of scuttlebutt on the street about GM. Here's the real word.

Witz: How GM Should Fix Itself by Gary Witzenburg (11/21/2005)
There's no quick and easy solution, but perceptions could help greatly.

Toyota Motor Corp. is moving steadily closer to its goal of unseating General Motors Corp. as the world's leading automaker.

In fact, with General Motors preparing to slash production capacity in North America by one million units over the next three years,Toyota is actually running ahead of the ambitious schedule laid out in the 2010 Global Vision document that the Japanese automaker published in the spring of 2002.

Right now the consensus is that GM will hang on to the top spot for 2006 - but after that, Toyota will replace the company on the charts.

"We aren't forecasting that Toyota will surpass GM next year," says John Tews of J.D. Power & Associates. Greg Gardner of Harbour Consulting noted that Toyota is expected to build 8.1 million vehicles this year, while GM's worldwide production will reach nine million units.

However, Toyota, which has already edged out the Ford Motor Co. to become the world's second-largest automaker, is moving steadily closer to GM. Only two days after GM announced it planned to close nine factories and eliminate 30,000 jobs by the end of 2008, the Japanese press reported that Toyota was pressing Fuji Heavy Industries to start building Toyotas in 2007 in a Lafayette, Ind., assembly plant. The underutilized Indiana plant is operated by Fuji's wholly owned subsidiary, Subaru.