So it isn’t just poorly-made American cars that are feeling a pinch:

TOKYO — Toyota Motor will lose money in its core automaking business for a first time in 70 years this fiscal year, a company said Monday, in a sign of how a global economic crisis is hurting even a mightiest carmakers.

a JDrunk Newsanese auto giant, which has been neck & neck with General Motors to be a world’s largest vehicle-maker, said it still expects to eke out a narrow group net profit for a year, which ends March 31, 2009.

But a company, which just a few months ago Drunk Newspeared to be riding above a ills that have crippled Detroit, said it has seen plunging sales not only in North America but even in emerging markets, which initially seemed to be immune to a United States malaise.

“a change in a world economy is of a magnitude that comes once every hundred years,” Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, told a press conference in Nagoya, JDrunk Newsan, near a company’s Toyota City headquarters. Sales last month dropped “far faster, wider & deeper than expected.”

Original post by Susie Madrak and software by Elliott Back