Welcome back reader, after what I hope has been an enjoyable and fruitful break. For us, the New Year has well and truly kicked-off and we are now full steam ahead in our preparations for the Geneva Motor Show which starts in just six weeks!

Last Friday I attended an EcoDriving training session here at TME. It was led by Bert Bosmans from Ecolife, a Belgian NGO that TME has worked with for some years to promote EcoDriving across Europe. I chose for the simulator based training, as I wanted to see what the 10000 other people across six countries who have followed this training since 2007 had experienced.

A few days ago Toyota France participated in the opening ceremony of our first Sustainable Retailer in La Rochelle in the west of France.  This is the result of more than 5 years work between Toyota Motor Europe, Toyota France, Toyota Financial Services, the dealer group Toys Motors and his architectural team.

I was recently lucky enough to be on vacation in the mountains. While I was riding up the mountain on the ski-lift with some friends I noticed that there seemed to be a lot fewer trees affected by acid rain as compared with my recollection of some years ago.  If this is true, then I hope it has a lot to do with the wider use of electricity from renewable sources. We believe this is a very important step to take to have a more sustainable business.

Sunday saw the closing of the doors of IAA in Frankfurt for another two years. It’s probably one of the biggest motor shows in the world. I don’t know if it has the largest number of visitors, but it is definitely, geographically, huge! I just measured it on Google Earth (50° 6’40.39″N, 8°38’43.52″E), and it’s more than a kilometre across, which goes a long way to explaining why my legs still ache following our 3 days of activities.