Thanks for the info. Do you think I could get $3100 under sticker price of a 2010 Prius with this article??? Maybe they will meet in the middle and give me $1550 off.

thats a big profit for one car.

Profits Honda and Toyota put back into R&D instead of Union Dues.

Is it a crime for a company to make a profit?

If someone owned a family store, and at the end of the year "just broke even", should they be satisfied with that?

So if the car company makes that much, how much does the dealer make directly?

If you think unions are the demise of the Big 3 I've got a bridge to nowhere I want to sell you.

The demise of GM and Chrysler can be attributed to top managements bad decisions! Too bad there's no Lee I aocca's to the rescue.

Each dealer is a separate business. They make or lose money on their own, based on what they pay for a car and how much they can sell it for. Toyota can make money and the dealer can lose, or the other way around. One is not connected to the other.

Tom

Thanks for posting.

What's the single digits gross profit margin? 1 billion?

Union member pay union dues not employers.
Workers who work for fair employers don't seek out union membership.
Unions would never have come into being had employers always been fair.

Well, if Toyota are making a single digit profit on each car, what's my chances of getting an $8.00 discount in these tough times? If I was greedy I'd go for $9.00!

Unfortunately (and I'm playing devil's advocate here as I come from a traditionally small-s socialist background and count myself as one) unions are susceptible to empire-building as much as corporations. I heard of a recent case here, where a union merger basically went wrong.

Professional union leaders - those where it is their only job - tend to operate in a way to justify their continued existence, so can end up blocking much-needed reforms. The Big 3 are sometime stymied in trying to improve product quality because the union won't accept automation to replace some manual workers and thereby reduce costs. The union shoot themselves in the foot (or possibly head), because the company simply relocates the work outside the country or state where union membership is mandatory.

Where the union has become institutionalised, the employer needs to stop fighting the union and try to appeal to the sense of the workers themselves. They have to remember that the worker is not the enemy.

I assume the article meant single-digit percentage gross profit margin. Gross profits don't include amortization of R&D costs, they just mean the profit over the materials and labour cost to assemble that vehicle.

Toyota's profit doesnt have anything to do with dealers - dealers get their margin based on certain % that doesnt have anything to do with toyota's profits.

It is less than Detroit used to get for SUVs and trucks, back in their heyday.

GM officials say the average reaches $39.68 an hour, including base pay, cost-of-living adjustments, night-shift premiums, overtime, holiday and vacation pay. Health-care, pension and other benefits average another $33.58 an hour, GM says. -

September 26, 2007 UNITED AUTO WORKERS OFF THE JOB, Striking back at globalization. By Ted Evanoff

According to the National Review:
Massive job cuts at General Motors, America's largest carmaker — coupled with the bankruptcy of Delphi, America's biggest autoparts maker — have provoked predictable handwringing from liberal pundits who worry that America is "losing its manufacturing base." But the wrenching change now buffeting the auto industry defies the usual press formulas. Just listen to Steve Miller a turnaround specialist who is steering Delphi's restructuring process. He exploded the myth of America's "endangered" union manufacturing jobs at his October press conference announcing Delphi's move into Chapter 11: "We cannot continue to pay $65 an hour for someone to cut the grass and remain competitive."
Take grass cutting. As defined by the current United Auto Worker contract negotiated with the "Big Five" (GM, Ford, Chrysler, and top parts makers Delphi and Visteon), an auto "production worker" is a job description that covers anything from mowing grass to cleaning the toilets. In the real world, these jobs would be outsourced to $8 an hour, no-benefit wage earners, but on Planet Big Five, these jobs get the same wages as any auto line-worker: an average $26 an hour ($60,000 a year) plus benefits that bring the company's total cost per worker to a staggering $65 an hour.
But at least the grass cutters are working for their pay. The UAW contract also guarantees that 12,000 autoworkers get full wage for doing nothing. On the heels of Miller's straight-talk, the Detroit News reported that "12,000 American autoworkers, instead of bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank." These aren't jobs. And they certainly aren't being "lost" to China.
"We just go in (to Ford's Michigan Truck Plant) and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper," The News quoted one UAW worker as saying. "Otherwise, I've just sat."
The coming months will be painful for many American autoworkers. Accustomed to a certain lifestyle, they will see their wages cut in half, jeopardizing second homes, college tuitions, and car payments. One blue-collar Delphi worker interviewed by the Detroit News makes $103,000 a year operating a forklift and fears the consequences if his pay is drastically reduced. But many Americans will ask how a forklift operator felt entitled to a six-figure income in the first place (according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average forklift operator wage in the U.S. is $26,000).

and look where that end up.

yes and no
just a small profit is OK.

3100 x 1 mil sold hybrides = 3.100.000.000

Yep, and the big truck/SUV market in the U.S. was driven by the fast easy money philosophy. Seemed obvious to many of us how this would eventually play out, but folks won't believe it when they are making easy money. Cheap gasoline was one driver, easy credit was another.

A big problem in the U.S. has been that nobody (individual or corporations) wants to become a millionaire slowly anymore...folks seem to think it should happen overnight and on borrowed money. The result is high risk gambles looking for massive short term payouts.

Our economy is no longer suitable for long term investing and has been a loser for over a decade. The top investment newsletter (as measured by return over the long run) has been in cash for over 20 years.

Well, duh! Those aren't the jobs most of us are concerned about. But nice try at changing the subject.

Which of course means that they go to recent immigrants and undocumented workers in many cases...or those with some pretty severe black marks on their records. Of course, $8/hr isn't exactly the sort of wage you can raise a family on, have health care, retirement, put kids through college, etc. So the rest of us end up subsidizing these wage earners--or more precisely, subsidize the employers who are paying below living wages. But conservative pundits like to socialize business costs to the taxpayer while screwing the worker (taxpayer.)

Wow, somebody sucks at math. 52 weeks a year, 40 hrs/week @ $26/hr = $54,080/year.

As for the $65/hr, that is typical bullshit from employers sandbagging their real cost. I used to laugh about that on my own salaried "benefit statements" each year where the company claimed it was spending twice as much on me as they were paying. Of course, 10 years ago they claimed to be spending $8,000/yr on health care...but opting out would only give me back $800/yr. Smell a rat?

They also double-counted vacation/sick time/holidays etc. And the supposed large amount for retirement wasn't real since almost all the vesting would be in the final five years...and they were doing their best to make sure that most workers wouldn't last that long. The actual amount set aside by the company was about 10% of what they claimed...hmm...suspiciously close to the health care ratio.

Depends on what a person is doing I suppose. All forklift operations are not created equal. When I was working in Alaska 20+ years ago the hourly rate for skilled equipment operators was approaching that. And you don't even want to know how much they were paying the crane operators. Back then I made $10, 15, then $26/hr in two seasons doing a mix of forklift/other equipment operation, and some manual labor. I was typically the youngest/lowest paid on those jobs (although I did have a kid working for me at times, and they assigned me a crane operator to do some of the forklift & other work after he scewed up royally on the main jobsite.)

At any rate, the Big 3 face all the same problems as any older company with defined benefit packages and healthcare costs in a shrinking market. Since pensions are not portable in the U.S. and healthcare inflation has been double that of other kinds of inflation for the past 30 years, this creates quite a mess. The legacy costs will sink an employer in any industry when this happens.