After three years of being bested by Toyota, General Motors is once again the world’s best selling automaker. General Motors sold 9,025,942 in 2011, a 7.6 percent increase over last year’s figures. General Motors even bested Volkswagen, who have made it a public goal to become the biggest automaker on the block. Toyota trailed both GM and VW though, whose sales dropped 6 percent in 2011.

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This comes a bit late but better late than never!

From AutoGuide.com:

Toyota is taking product development authority away from Japanese bosses and putting it in the hands of North American executives as part of a larger change aimed at fixing quality control issues that hurt the automaker’s reputation last year.

Until now, vehicles produced and designed and developed in North America had to be approved by chief engineers in Japan. Vehicles unique to the North American market such as the Venza, Sienna, Avalon, Tacoma and Tundra will no longer require painstaking and frustrating sign-offs from Japan at each step of the development processes.

“We are going to implement the process from design to preparation for production to development, cost planning, and identifying and selecting suppliers,” said Inaba, CEO of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. “All these processes are going to be 100 percent done here, without going back to Japan for approval.”

The changes come too late to affect the development of the redesigned 2012 Toyota Camry due this fall, however upcoming models based in North America, such as the next Tundra pickup, will see the result of the new structure.

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From the Detroit Free Press:

Toyota will begin cranking up its North American factories faster than expected, returning to 70% of normal production in June as it rebounds from parts shortages caused by the earthquake in Japan.

The company cut production to about 30% of normal in May by idling factories for several days or reducing their hours. It warned dealers to expect shortages of some models well into the summer.

But Toyota said Wednesday that the parts situation is improving as supply companies take measures to counter the effects of the quake.

A March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged auto parts plants in northeastern Japan, causing shortages that have affected nearly all automakers but have hit Toyota and Honda especially hard.

Toyota said in a statement that it would evaluate production for each model every month, and it may not return to fully normal production until late this year.

Next month, though, Toyota will move to 100% production of eight models in North America. They include the Avalon large car, Camry midsize car, Corolla compact, Highlander SUV, Matrix small car, Sequoia large SUV, Sienna minivan and Venza crossover vehicle, Toyota said in a statement.

Read the full article.

That may a silly question as it relates to the most successful car company in recent years, but Toyota has been facing some issues that go beyond the problems caused by the economic crisis.

The Detroit News has a lengthy article about how Toyota is no longer profitable in North America, and Yoshimi Inaba, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor America and chairman and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales USA, made some pretty stunning admissions about the problems facing Toyota.

Because of Toyota’s success for the last eight years, there was an attitude among some executives that, “OK, now we have been so successful, we understand the market, so can make a decision there rather than here,” Inaba said.

Inaba said the company is listening to the market, and customers “had been a little bit lost.”

When asked whether Toyota had become complacent, he said, “Complacent or arrogant — a lot of people use that — I don’t know,” he said, adding that the company had tried to guard against those qualities.

Inaba acknowledged that Toyota vehicles had often lacked “passion” and that the company’s vehicles must be “more exciting, more nimble.”

“Toyota is a good car but not exciting. Those are the comments we usually (or) always get,” Inaba said.

In my opinion Toyota has just found itself in a position where the competition has caught up to them in quality and surpassed them in design. When you consider that other automakers have figured out how to build cars more efficiently, the edge is gone for the Japanese giant. Toyota took advantage of that cost advantage and that allowed them to rake in big profits. When the economy comes back they will make money again but their rivals are growing with Hyundai looking like the real value in the foreign car crowd (have you seen the Genesis?) and Lexus looking more and more like an overpriced Camry.

Also, did I mention that Ford is at the start of their best product launches in decades and GM and Chrysler are trimmed down and ready to compete again? Let the games begin!

Toyota’s new President is starting at the time when the mighty Toyota is having uncharacteristic problems. Toyota’s U.S. sales tanked in June, and for the first six months of 2009 Toyota was outsold by Ford in the United States.

Fortune spoke with Akio Toyoda about his vision for Toyota’s future.

Even though he has the same last name as five of the 10 previous presidents of Toyota Motor, Akio Toyoda is nothing like his predecessors.

Item: He has spent seven years in the U.S., holds an MBA, and speaks flawless English.

Item: He likes to race cars and just completed a 24-hour endurance competition with three other team members in a Toyota supercar at Germany’s famed Nürburgring.

Item: At age 53 he is 14 years younger than the man he is succeeding, and he believes that his relative youth “can make a unique contribution” to the company.

Toyoda takes office two months after Toyota reported the biggest annual loss in its history — $4.4 billion. He thinks that his family’s company — at last count, the Toyoda clan owned approximately 2% of the stock — suffered because of a “once-in-a-century crisis” brought on by the global economic slowdown, as well as Toyota’s own internal problems, some of them at its U.S. operations. He vows to rein in overcapacity, reorganize operations to strengthen control, and get the company back to basics. He especially wants to reinstill dedication to one of the pillars of Toyota’s production system: genchi genbutsu, meaning “go and see for yourself.”

Akio Toyoda is a grandson of Toyota’s founder, Kiichiro Toyoda (the family changed the spelling of the company’s name for greater euphony) and the son of Shoichiro Toyoda, now honorary chairman. After getting a law degree from prestigious Keio University, he went to the U.S., where he received an MBA from Babson College (the alma mater of another auto scion, Edsel Ford II). He joined Toyota in 1984 and returned to the U.S. for a two-year stint as head of NUMMI, the California plant that is a joint venture with General Motors. At ultraconservative Toyota, Toyoda is considered a bit of a radical. In the early part of this decade he headed the development team for an Internet venture, Gazoo.com, which provides information on new and used vehicles and which morphed into a lifestyle cybermall.

If you read the actual interview, he doesn’t sound like much of a radical, but it looks like some changes will be in order under his leadership.