ASIA!

Toyota has cast its eyes on the European markets and is out to eat Daimler Chrysler's lunch.

Forget about Toyota overtaking General Motors as the biggest automaker in the world. That is old hat. And Rick Wagoner, boss of GM, has come to a sort of grudging acceptance of sharing the top two positions with Toyota. The person that really hates the guts of Fujio Cho, chairman of Toyota, is not in the US but across the Atlantic. He is Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler Chrysler.

In January, Fujio Cho gave Dieter Zetsche a figurative slap on the face that the 54-year-old Turkey-born German is unlikely to recover from for a long time.

In that month, Toyota posted a 21% rise in sales of new cars in Europe, boosted by new versions of its Yaris and Aygo models and, of course, its popular RAV4 sports utility vehicle.

This allowed Toyota to overtake Daimler Chrysler in new car registration in Europe, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. ACEA surveys car sales in all European Union members except Malta and Cyprus. It also collects data on Switzerland, Norway and Iceland.

Car sales are affected by many factors—model changes, tax increases, financing terms. Generally, sales figures for a particular month are not considered significant, unless they form part of a trend.

But no one can overlook the January figures, as they are symbolically important. Toyota has already made great headway in America—its Camry has outsold GM’s No.1 car, the venerable Chevy, by a stunning 35% in 2006; and its newly introduced Tundra, a pick-up truck with a powerful V8 engine, is eating rapidly into the Detroit Big Three’s last stronghold.

Now, it seems that Toyota has cast its eyes on the European markets and is out to eat Daimler's lunch. And it is up to Zetsche to counter its assault.

So far, Zetsche, a bald man with a white handlebar moustache, is not doing a good job. Taking over the top job at the beginning of 2006, the high point of the career of this electrical engineer came when he was listed by Time magazine as one of 2006's 100 most influential people.

He then quickly suffered what many called the "magazine cover syndrome"—which sees a person’s fortunes dip soon after he or she has been featured on the cover or even the inside pages of a magazine.

In June, the Chrysler Group announced the Employee Pricing Plus programme, which featured Zetsche as Dr Z, the spokesman for DaimlerChrysler for a series of TV commercials in the US and Canada. The group also set up a Ask Dr Z website in cartoon format.

The move was supposed to give Zetsche exposure, but the campaign bombed. Among other things, the campaign was supposed to emphasise the consumer benefits of the best of American and German engineering and design built into every Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicle. But most cars featured in the ads did not incorporate any recognisable German technology. Sales slumped and some new ads, not featuring Dr Z, were quickly introduced to control the damage.

Today Zetsche has decided that Chrysler has become an intolerable burden and is in talks with GM and others to sell the American carmaker. The only notable automaker not interested in Chrysler is Toyota, whose senior officials said they could see no synergy linking the two. Would the sale of Chrysler help Zetsche wage a better battle against Toyota? Only time will tell.