The driver punched the air as his red and white McLaren-Honda roared over the finish line. It was in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, 1988, and Ayrton Senna had just become Formula One world champion for the first time. The McLaren racing team and its engine ...

Engineers at Toyota Motor Corp. say they have tamed volatile lithium-ion battery technology, and can now safely pack more power at no significant extra cost, giving the automaker the option to enter the growing all-electric car market. While rivals including Tesla Motors and Nissan Motor ...

Nissan Motor Co. has come up with a new type of gasoline engine that it says may make some advanced diesel engines obsolete. The new engine uses variable compression technology, which Nissan engineers say allows it at any given moment to choose an optimal compression ...

Some of Japan's top automakers, with a reputation for quality performance wrapped in often bland design, are turning to the country's pop culture to give them the "J-factor" and help set them apart in a world of growing look-alikes. Designers of Nissan Motor's GT-R supercar, ...

The days of cheap and cheerful cars like the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla may be numbered as technology firms Google and Apple muscle into the auto industry and change the way people own and drive automobiles. That is the warning from Ken Okuyama, high-end ...

Asia's two vehicle-making powerhouses, Japan and China, are jostling for supremacy over how future electric cars should generate their power — from batteries or hydrogen-powered fuel cells. In a potentially high-stakes clash reminiscent of Sony versus Panasonic in the Betamax-VHS video war in the 1980s, ...

When Daihatsu Motor Co. launched the Mira e:S minicar in 2011, the Toyota affiliate thought it had found a model for emerging markets. The Mira e:S — e for eco, S for smart — was capable of going 30 kilometers on a liter of ...

Shigehisa Takada, the third-generation head of Takata Corp., shows little sense of the crisis engulfing the Japanese air bag maker at the center of one of the auto industry's biggest safety recalls, according to three people who have met him recently. Just days before a ...

When a Japanese carmaker issued a tender for shock absorbers a few years ago for a model it planned to sell in Indonesia, two suppliers came back with bids that were "so obviously coordinated," said an executive at the automaker. One supplier put in a ...

In 1997, Toyota caught its competitors by surprise with the revolutionary Prius, the first commercially successful gasoline-electric hybrid car. Now it is trying to do the same with a technology that seems straight out of science fiction. Toyota Motor Corp. will next year launch a ...