Tausi Insider

Toyota isn’t giving up on its iconic Prius nameplate, yet. An all-new and drastically different looking 2023 Prius hybrid and Prius Prime plug-in hybrid were unveiled at the City Market Social House in California on Wednesday night, ahead of the 2022 Los Angeles Auto Show. “We want to build as many hybrids as we can because the goal is carbon reduction,” said David Christ, group vice president and general manager of Toyota Motor Sales USA, in a one-on-one interview ahead of the unveilings. “Since we started with Prius 25 years ago, we’ve sold 5.5 million hybrids in the U.S. – 20 million globally and that has resulted in 82 million tons of CO2 emissions that have been reduced – that’s the equivalent of 5.5 million all-electric EVs.” David Christ, group vice president and general manager of the Toyota Division at Toyota Motor North America speaks as Japanese automaker Toyota unveils the newly redesigned 2023 Prius prior to the start of the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, Californ...

Dollarama Inc DOL-T raised its full-year same-store sales forecast on Wednesday, as the Canadian discount store chain benefited from inflation-weary consumers shopping at its stores in search of cheaper groceries and household supplies. While inflation in Canada has eased in recent months, consumers are still battling higher prices of groceries and gasoline, prompting more shoppers to make their purchases at discount retailers. Montreal-based Dollarama has seen robust demand for consumables such as snack bars, chocolates and beverages, and also rolled out additional price points up to $5 to expand the range of products. The company’s U.S. counterpart Dollar Tree Inc raised its annual net sales forecast in November, while Dollar General Corp said last week that its full-year same-store sales would be toward the upper end of its previous estimate. Dollarama said it now expects comparable store-sales growth between 9.5 per cent and 10.5 per cent for fiscal 2023, up from prior forecast o...

Canada’s banking regulator has raised the ceiling on bank capital levels and ramped up the reserves the country’s largest banks must hold, citing rising risks posed by inflation, interest-rate hikes and household debt as reasons to expand a financial safety net designed to guard against economic shocks. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) increased the maximum level of the domestic stability buffer Thursday. The DSB, which will now range from 0 to 4 per cent of a bank’s risk-weighted assets, is a store of capital built up in good times to be used to soften the blow when conditions turn sour. OSFI also announced that it will set the buffer higher on Feb. 1, 2023, raising it to 3 per cent from its current level of 2.5 per cent, which had been the top end of the DSB’s range since it was formally created in 2018. By requiring banks to hold more capital when business is good and credit losses are low, OSFI is building a surplus that it can then release when b...

The lower the kilowatt hours, the greater the efficiency. Illustration by Glenn Harvey When I was driving home from a family visit in the spring, the display on the dashboard notified me that my electric car’s energy usage over the hour-long drive had – are you sitting down for this? – dipped below an average of 12 kilowatt hours per 100 kilometres. I just about pounded the air and screamed, “Yes!” There are many joys to driving an electric vehicle. The silence comes to mind. The impressive acceleration never gets old. Living on the cutting edge of technology for the first time in my Luddite life offers another thrill. But for me, nothing tops the happiness I get from observing, and improving upon, energy efficiency – that is, how far I’m going on a charge. Dipping below that 12-kilowatt average was a major threshold. If the number looks a bit unwieldy, let me translate: It tells me how much of my battery was being used to travel 100 kilometres. The lower the kilowatt hours, the grea...

The housing market slump deepened in November as sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed for the tenth consecutive month – the longest such stretch on records going back to 1999. Existing home sales fell 7.7 per cent last month from October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. That’s a slower sales pace than what economists had expected, according to FactSet. Sales plunged 35.4 per cent from November last year. Excluding the steep sales downturn that occurred in May 2020 at the start of the pandemic, sales are now at the slowest annual pace since November 2010, when the housing market was mired in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s. Still, home prices continued to rise last month, though at a far smaller rate than just a few months ago. The national median home sales price rose 3.5 per cent in November from a year earlier, to $370,700. Nearly a quarter of homes that sold last month fet...

The Canadian dollar CADUSD weakened against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday as a rebound in equity markets lost momentum and despite preliminary domestic data showing that wholesale trade rose in November. The loonie was trading 0.3 per cent lower at 1.3650 to the greenback, or 73.26 U.S. cents, after moving in a range of 1.3572 to 1.3663. Wall Street stocks fell as investors weighed signs of a still tight U.S. labor market. On Wednesday, the major U.S. indexes posted their biggest daily gains so far in December. Canada is a major producer of commodities, including oil, so the loonie tends to be sensitive to shifts in investor sentiment. Oil climbed to its highest level in 2-1/2 weeks with U.S. crude, heating oil and jet fuel stocks growing tighter just as a wintry blast hits the United States. U.S. crude prices were up 1.1 per cent at $79.14 a barrel. Canadian wholesale trade rose 1.9 per cent in November from October, largely reflecting higher sales in the motor vehicles and parts...