Toyota Is Advertising Its Cars To AI
Happy Friday! It's October 2, 2026, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you'll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.
In this morning's edition we're looking at Toyota's new ad strategy and GM's sales woes. We'll also look at BYD raking in cash, and Volvo throwing in the towel on its estimates.
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1st Gear: Toyota is targeting new ads at AI bots
The internet is in a bad place right now. People are increasingly just asking AI for answers to things, and taking its responses as gospel rather than checking sources or visiting other sites. Toyota has seen the coming of the new age, and is making sure it's prepared — by advertising to the bots directly. From Automotive News:
With AI driving well over half of web traffic today, Toyota has seen its traffic at Toyota.com and other top-of-funnel online sites dip by around 20 percent — a trend [Toyota head of marketing Mike] Tripp said is in line with the broader industry. To stay ahead of the game, Toyota has pivoted its digital focus from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Agent Engine Optimization (AEO).
In other words, trying to directly attract eyeballs online is becoming less effective, so the Japanese automaker shifted its messaging to become more attractive to legions of AI bots, in hopes that they will send the human eyeballs they guard Toyota's way.
Because consumers rarely check the sourcing of AI-generated answers, Toyota is auditing its AI prompts to ensure the brand remains an authoritative "source of truth," Tripp said. That has required building out highly specific, FAQ-style content on the back end of Toyota's sites and YouTube channels to feed the AI models exactly what they are scraping for.
If that sounds bad, imagine being an online automotive outlet!
2nd Gear: GM is losing ground on sales to Toyota
Toyota's ad strategy seems to be working, though, because it's starting to approach GM's market lead in the United States. Of course, selling all those hybrids in the face of high gas prices helped too. From Reuters:
Oct 1 (Reuters) – General Motors remained the top US auto seller during the third quarter despite a dip in sales, but Toyota Motor continued chipping away at its lead as high gasoline prices pushed buyers toward hybrids.
GM, Ford Motor and Stellantis — also called the Detroit Three — could see their combined market share dip to around 36% in the quarter, according to industry research firm Cox Automotive, while hybrid-heavy Asian brands including Toyota and Honda are expected to account for more than half of new vehicle sales in the period.
Sometimes I wonder if U.S. automakers are so sure of a bailout should things go wrong, that they simply don't innovate or compete any more and rest on the laurels of their history. I'm no MBA, but that doesn't seem like a spectacular way to run a company.
3rd Gear: BYD is doing great
While GM struggles to fend off Toyota, another competitor waits in the wings: BYD, which just keeps growing on Chinese shores and abroad. Demand within China has tapered off, but that hasn't slowed BYD's global growth. From Reuters:
BEIJING, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD's global sales rose for a fifth straight month in September, buoyed by strong exports that have increasingly become a key pillar offsetting persistently weak demand at home.
Vehicle sales rose 17% from a year earlier to 463,561 units last month, easing from a 17.8% increase in August, while overseas shipments of passenger vehicles and pickups jumped 153.9% to 179,877 units, according to Reuters calculations based on BYD's disclosure on Thursday.
As U.S. automakers panic to ban BYD from our shores, it's easy to see why — our domestic automakers already can barely compete with Japanese and Korean competition. Throwing even cheaper Chinese cars into the mix could well mean the end of the Detroit Three.
4th Gear: Volvo gives up on its annual estimates in the face of slow sales
We talk a lot about corporate guidance in TMS, at least recently — the estimates that a company lays out for how it'll do in a given year. The Iran war has made many of those estimates obsolete, and now Volvo is the latest to tear up its papers. From Reuters:
STOCKHOLM, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Swedish-based Volvo Cars will not achieve its previous full-year sales volume and cash flow guidance owing to an increasingly challenging market and deteriorating near-term outlook, it said on Friday.
Volvo Cars, which is majority owned by China's Geely Holding, has struggled to meet previous profitability targets because of tariffs, weaker electric vehicle demand and high development costs.
It said in a statement that the market backdrop had resulted in lower than expected sales and a weaker full-year outlook for the company. It did not specify new guidance.
Most affected automakers this year have been putting out altered guidance numbers, but Volvo is playing it by ear. I could see that being the smart move, rather than just publishing new numbers to also fail to meet.
Reverse: Help, I'm stepping into the
A dimension not of sight or sound, but of mind.
The Fuel Up
It seems like we've largely given up on the whole "only doing war against Iran on the weekends" thing, so maybe this weeklong trend of prices sliding downward will continue. Or, maybe not. It's honestly impossible to tell.
On The Radio: Wasureranneyo - 'Nanmonee'
"Chainsmoker Cat" is a good show.