#JapanEarthquake

Three years after the devastating Fukushima earthquake in Japan, radioactive used vehicles are surfacing in Central Asia.

There’s been quite a lot of talk over the last few years concerning the replacement for Nissan‘s venerable Titan full-size pickup.

This year has been a  tough one for Toyota thanks to Mother Nature and her natural disasters. As if the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan wasn’t bad enough, Thailand experienced its worst floods in almost 70 years, disrupting Toyota’s production of their popular Camry and Prius models.

As Typhoon Roke made landfall on the Pacific Coast of Honshu, Japan’s largest island on September 22, automakers in the country, including Toyota, Honda and Nissan had shuttered plants and other facilities in anticipation of potential damage.

It’s only been a mere six months since Japan was devastated by earthquake and tsunami, but on September 13, 2011, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing Executive Vice President Steve St. Angelo proudly announced that all Toyota models in the North American line-up have finally returned to 100 percent production.

It sounds like the plot to a bad science fiction movie. ASIMO, Honda‘s humanoid robot, is sent into the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plan in Japan to help out where human’s can’t, only to be transformed by Plutonium into a killing machine.

This year hasn’t been the kindest to Japanese automakers Honda and Toyota. The devastation wrought by March’s earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, resulted in severe disruptions to their supply chains, causing dealer inventories to run low and other automakers to gain ground in sales.

Still plagued by the effects of the March 11th earthquake, Toyota won’t be able to turn a profit Stateside until September.

If you live in America, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to still favor Yahoo over Google. Over the recent years, Google has evolved from a search engine service to providing free email, navigation, maps, operating systems, image hosting, social networks…you get the picture. The technology that Google has created is, for the most part, beneficial to human kind, though some question the comapny’s practices of privacy and security.

Sales of the Prius in 2011 are expected to surpass even the number sold in 2010 says Toyota, despite the disastrous earthquake in Japan that limited production of the popular hybrid.

Yu Muroga was driving along peacefully in Japan when the earthquake and tsunami hit. We’re not quite sure why he had a HD camera running on the dashboard, but we’re certainly amazed by the footage it captured.

Even though the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Japan needs no real introduction, very few videos have surfaced that showed the incident from this point-of-view. In fact, watching the video is a pretty surreal experience, something you’d expect out of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It starts off with an unsuspecting in-car point-of-view as the earthquake rocks the earth. It’s worth mentioning that the footage probably didn’t capture the huge one, but rather one of the aftershocks before the actual tsunami came. As the car pushed on to wherever it was trying to head to, the tsunami hits and flooding occurs. From there it’s heartbreaking to see people getting stuck in their cars or climbing to the roofs of their cars seeking refuge from the oncoming flood. It’s really something else to see cars floating around in a sea of water helplessly and how devastating the events were in Japan over three months ago.

Check out the video after the break.

Speaking to its US dealers, American Honda Motor Co has said that they can resume taking orders of smaller, made in Japan offerings such as the Fit subcompact and Insight Hybrid.

Still struggling in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which severely disrupted production, Toyota Motor Co has said that it expects it’s full-year profit for 2011 to fall some 31 percent short of original projections.

Hyundai– Kia will outsell Toyota and Honda in May sales, according to TrueCar. TrueCar expects Hyundai-Kia to sell 115,434 units in May. This number represents an increase of 43.4 percent over May 2010 making the Korean group a 10.9 percent market share putting it number three behind Ford and GM.

Toyota’s plans to resume full production capacity have been reported pretty frequently, but they are moving on track faster than those reports suggest: the world’s largest automaker believes that it can bring Japanese production back to 90% of pre-earthquake levels, by next month.