The evolution of Toyota, one of the world’s best known automobile marques
1.The company was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spin-off from his father’s company, Toyota Industries, to make automobiles.
2.Three years earlier, in 1934, while still being a department of Toyota Industries, the company had created its first product, the Type A engine, and, in 1936, its first passenger car, the Toyota AA. Its price was ¥3,350 , ¥400 cheaper than Ford or GM cars.
3.In September 1936, the company conducted a public competition to design a new emblem. However, Risaburo Toyoda, who had married into the Toyoda family, preferred ‘Toyota’ because it took eight brush strokes (a fortuitous number) to write it in Japanese and was visually simpler.
4.From September 1947, Toyota’s small-sized vehicles were sold under the name ‘Toyopet’. However, when Toyota eventually entered the American market in 1957 with the Crown, the name was not well received there owing to its connotations of toys and pets. The name was soon dropped for the American market, but continued in other markets until the mid-1960s.
5.The Toyota Motor Company received its first Japanese Quality Control Award at the beginning of the 1980s and began participating in a wide variety of motor sport.
6.In 1982, the Toyota Motor Company and Toyota Motor Sales merged into one company, the Toyota Motor Corporation. Two years later, Toyota entered into a joint venture with General Motors, under the name New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc (NUMMI), to operate an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California.
7.In the 1990s, Toyota began to branch out from producing mostly compact cars by adding many larger and more luxurious vehicles to their line-up. Toyota also undertook the production of the world’s best-selling hybrid car, the Prius, in 1997.
8.In 2002, Toyota managed to enter a Formula One works team and establish joint ventures with French motoring companies, Citroën and Peugeot, a year after Toyota started producing cars in France.
