Toyota Motor Corporation is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan, and is the world’s largest automaker.

In 1934, while still a department of Toyota Industries, it created its first product Type A engine and in 1936 its first passenger car the Toyota AA. The company was eventually founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spinoff from his father’s company Toyota Industries to create automobiles. Toyota currently owns and operates Lexus and Scion brands and has a majority shareholding stake in Daihatsu Motors, and minority shareholdings in Fuji Heavy Industries Isuzu Motors, and Yamaha Motors. The company includes 522 subsidiaries.

Toyota is headquartered in Aichi, Nagoya and in Tokyo. In addition to manufacturing automobiles, Toyota provides financial services through its division Toyota Financial Services and also creates robots. Toyota Industries and Finance divisions form the bulk of the Toyota Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the world.

Name

Vehicles were originally sold under the name “Toyoda” (トヨダ), from the family name of the company’s founder, Kiichiro Toyoda. In September 1936 the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Out of 27,000 entries the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for (Toyoda) in a circle. But Risaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred “Toyota” (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a fortuitous number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off two ticks at the end) and sounded better with two “t”s. Since “Toyoda” literally means fertile rice paddies, changing the name also helped to distance the company from associations with old fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the “Toyota Motor Company”.

In predominantly Chinese speaking countries, Toyota is known as “豊田”. This is a direct translation of “Toyoda” (fertile rice paddies) into Chinese.

From September 1947, Toyota’s small-sized vehicles were sold under the name “Toyopet” (トヨペット). The first vehicle sold under this name was the Toyopet SA but it also included vehicles such as the Toyopet SB light truck, Toyopet Stout light truck, Toyopet Crown and the Toyopet Corona. However, when Toyota eventually entered the American market in 1957 with the Crown, the name was not well received due to connotations of Toys and pets. The name was soon dropped for the American market but continued in other markets until the mid 1960′s.

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