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Wednesday is for the Troublemakers as our team descends on Atlanta to host Live Tonight at Buckhead Theatre. Today we are talking about Toyota news driving their stock valuation, Lithia’s first purchase of the year, and Reddit ghosting Google.
- We have been following the roller coaster week of Toyota news and after their EV plan announcements, Wall Street had rose colored glasses on as stocks rose 5%.
- The president of BEV Factory, Takero Kato, stated that Toyota is targeting a driving range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) for its EVs and aims to produce about 1.7 million vehicles by 2030.
- Toyota has set a goal of achieving sales of 1.5 million all-electric vehicles per year by 2026, and selling 3.5 million all-electric vehicles annually by 2030.
- The company is now accelerating the development of BEVs and is "determined to become a world leader in battery EV energy consumption."
- Lithia continues its growth trajectory as they complete the purchase of 14 dealerships from Virginia-based Priority Auto.
- Dennis Ellmer, from whom the dealerships were bought, will stay on with Lithia and continue to serve as CEO of Priority Auto. He has retained the two Lexus stores separately.
- The acquisition is expected to add $1.2 billion in annual revenue to Lithia. So far in 2023, Lithia has acquired dealerships representing $3.2 billion in annual revenue, including its March purchase of Jardine Motors Group in the United Kingdom.
- This transaction marks Lithia's first U.S. dealership deal of 2023 and is the biggest deal of the year in terms of the number of dealerships acquired.
- Reddit users have taken to the internet to fight their battles (well, I guess they always do that). With looming changes to the Reddit API structure, thousands of subreddits have gone dark, giving search engines headaches trying to find quality content.
- Over 8,000 subreddits have gone dark in protest of Reddit's upcoming API changes. This has significantly impacted the availability of information from these subreddits.
- Even for those who don't regularly use Reddit, the blackout has an impact. Reddit links often appear at the top of search results, so many people have likely found useful information on the site that is now inaccessible.
- Many subreddits are planning to stay dark indefinitely, which could lead to a longer-term impact on the usefulness of Google's search results.
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