Well-known and well-loved, the Toyota Motor Corporation has been making some of the world’s most popular cars for decades and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t driven one at some point in their life. This automobile manufacturer has been around for close to a century and with those many years comes a rich and interesting history. Below is a list of five of the most interesting Toyota facts, but there are plenty of other interesting facts about Toyota out there to discover!
5 Toyota Facts
- Before cars, Toyota sold textiles. (source) In 1933 the company was started as a division of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works after the Japanese government encouraged them to develop automobiles due to the war with China and a lack of domestic vehicle production.
- Toyota’s company name was originally Toyoda. (source) The Toyoda family founded the Toyota Motor Corporation and used “Toyota” because it took 8 Japanese strokes to write instead of 10, and 8 is considered to be a lucky number in Japan.
- Toyota is the most popular car brand in the world. (source) It was found to have the largest market share in 44 countries around the world, more than double that of the second most popular car brand.
- There is a city in Japan named after Toyota. (source) Toyota City was renamed from Koromo in 1959 to show it’s appreciation for the town’s major employer, the Toyota Motor Corporation.
- Toyota was the first to produce more than 10 million vehicles in one year. (source) In 2013 Toyota achieve the feat of becoming the very first automobile manufacturer in history to produce more than 10 million vehicles in a single year.
