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By Joseph White, Global Automotive Correspondent

Greetings from the Motor City!

Chuck Berry wrote some of the best songs about driving – but the one that popped up on the mental jukebox after reading this morning’s news from the World of Cars was “You Can’t Catch Me” – the new theme song of the Tesla drivers tooling around with their Apple VR goggles on.

Yes.  People appear to be doing that. Look out New Jersey….

In addition to surveying the new frontiers in distracted driving, we’ll dig into Toyota’s hybrid-powered profit surge and check in on the troubles at Tesla and Cruise. Everybody ready?

Today –

• • Hybrids and a weak yen power Toyota

  • Is Tesla still one of the “Magnificent Seven?”

  • Cruise tries to catch a break

Akio Toyoda. Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Toyota shares jumped Tuesday after the world’s top-selling automaker reported stronger-than-expected quarterly profits and boosted its fiscal year profit outlook.

Strong sales of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and a weak yen that pushed up dollar-denominated revenue drove the result.

Quite a turnaround from last year when Chair Akio Toyoda was under fire from big investors for questioning the wisdom of a rapid transition to fully electric vehicles.

Toyota’s decision to walk more slowly toward an all-electric future than rivals such as Volkswagen or General Motors is paying off – for now.

(Some rivals are also climbing back on the hybrid bandwagon. Ford reported sales of its hybrid models jumped nearly 43% in January, while EV sales slumped by nearly 11%. GM confirmed it plans to offer a plug-in hybrid in North America.)

Toyota cranked profit margins to 14% for the latest quarter by holding down inventories and defending high prices. Tesla’s pursuit of sales volume through price cutting sliced its profit margins to a more Detroit-style 8.2%.

Toyota’s culture of rejecting complacency and pushing for continuous improvement will come in handy going forward. The company has to deal with product certification test cheating scandals at affiliates, including the Daihatsu mini-car brand.

Tesla and China’s BYD have leads in EV production profitability and new manufacturing technology that threaten Toyota’s dominance as the industry’s low-cost mass producer in the longer term.

But for now, Akio Toyoda and CEO Koji Sato are winning. Since Jan. 1, Toyota’s Japanese shares are up 21% and are testing record highs. Tesla’s stock is down 27% – a market cap loss of $214 billion.

A Tesla showroom in Berlin. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Tesla shares on Monday hit their lowest level since last May after German software company SAP took Tesla off its list of company cars and brokerage Piper Sandler dropped its price target.

Tesla shares have been skidding since late December. The decline steepened after Elon Musk told investors on Jan. 30 to brace for a year of slower growth.

Tesla’s luster has dulled to the point that some analysts are suggesting the electric vehicle pioneer should get tossed out of Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks.

A Cruise robo-taxi doing the right thing in San Francisco. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

Representatives of General Motors’ Cruise robo-taxi company are scheduled to plead their case today to California regulators who ordered the company’s driverless cars off the streets of San Francisco last October.

Cruise has offered $75,000 to resolve the California Public Utilities Commission’s investigation of the response to an Oct. 2 accident during which a Cruise robo-taxi dragged a pedestrian 20 feet down a San Francisco street after the victim was hit by another, human-driven car.

Today’s hearing, scheduled at 1:30 PM Pacific time, can be viewed here.

The incident and Cruise management’s mishandling of subsequent disclosures to regulators have put in doubt the future of what was the leading U.S. rival to Alphabet’s Waymo robo-taxi operation.

It is not clear where or when Cruise will relaunch its service, and experts predict it will be a long road back after the disclosures about technical and management mistakes in a lengthy and scathing report by an outside law firm. The U.S. Justice Department, the SEC and other regulators are investigating.

GM CEO Mary Barra has said Cruise will be relaunched. But she has ordered spending be cut by $1 billion this year. GM has reported $9 billion in operating losses at Cruise since 2017. A review of the unit’s strategy is underway, and the outcome may not become clear until a GM investor day, as yet unscheduled.

Fallout from the Cruise debacle could become a problem for Waymo, which is seeking to expand its Los Angeles and San Francisco service areas. The Cruise accident could boost the chances for a proposal in the state legislature to give local governments the power to block robo-taxis in their communities.

The United Auto Workers’ effort to organize workers at non-union auto factories has hit another milestone: Half the workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn. assembly plant have signed on to support joining the union.

More than 30% of workers at Hyundai’s assembly plant in Montgomery, Ala. and the Mercedes plant in Vance, Ala. have signed union cards, the union has said.

The UAW’s unprecedented effort to organize all non-union assembly plants all at once is gaining ground, but still has a long way to go.

The union has said 10,000 workers at 13 factories have signed union cards. That’s a lot – but averages to 769 workers per factory. Tesla’s Austin assembly operation employs 20,000 people, according to the Austin Regional Manufacturers Association.

The big test will be whether the UAW can get 70% of a plant’s workers to sign on – the threshold the union has said would trigger a move for a formal recognition vote sanctioned by the National Labor Relations board.

Electric van startup Arrival put two units into the UK equivalent of bankruptcy protection and named EY as administrators.

Stellantis chair John Elkann scotched rumors that the automaker created by the merger of Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler has designs on another acquisition. Or rather, he tried. Elkann was responding to market chatter that Stellantis had discussed a combination with Renault, which is partly controlled by the French government. Could be too soon after the former Fiat Chrysler’s talks with Renault in 2019 were frustrated by meddling from French ministers.

Battery maker SK Innovation warned investors it expects slower growth in EV demand and posted worse than expected results for the latest quarter. SK supplies legacy automakers including Ford, Volkswagen and Hyundai.

Prices for rare earth minerals essential to EVs appear to have bottomed out and could head up later this year – especially if China throttles back output, analysts said. Instead of OPEC, the green energy sector can worry about ….C-REMM? (China Rare Earth Mineral Monopoly.)

Lyft will guarantee weekly earnings for drivers on its network. The move is designed to attract more drivers. Lyft and larger rival Uber have faced penalties for underpaying drivers.

Honda recalled 750,000 late-model vehicles to fix potentially defective airbags.

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