Toyota. Following the dream, overtaking the tomorrow
Toyota is a Japanese company that has been engaged in car, truck, and bus production for more than a century. A new car comes off its conveyors every few seconds, and 6.5M Toyota cars are produced annually. Toyota has created over 200 car models throughout its existence. Toyota cars are sold in 170 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. The main capacities of the brand are located in Japan, the USA, Thailand, Indonesia, and Canada.* *as of 2019
Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car in the world and with the appropriate certificate from the Guinness Book of Records.
Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car in the world, only in 2016, almost 300,000 cars of this model were sold. By the way, do you remember that the ‘corolla’ is a collection of flower petals that make up the interior of a double perianth? That is, Corolla means petals around the center of a flower. From 1966 to 2013, the company sold over 40 million Toyota Corolla cars! This model is officially recognized as the best-selling car in the world and has received the appropriate certificate from the Guinness Book of Records.
For 3 years in a row, Toyota is recognized by experts as the most powerful car company in the world, as well as the most expensive brand. And according to the ‘MIT Technology Review’ magazine, Toyota is among the top 50 most high-tech companies in the world. In the latest few years, Toyota has been leading the technological innovation in the automotive industry, with 1540 patents for new technologies in just one year! More than any other car manufacturer in the world has! Toyota spends over $1M every hour on research and development. This brings it ahead of most competitors for years to come.* *As of 2018-2019
Toyota began to produce the world’s first hybrid mass-production car Toyota Prius with a unique hybrid engine, that enabled Toyota to win the world’s largest share of the hybrid car market, selling them more than 10 million!
Toyota spends over $1M every hour on research and development!
Toyota is the most powerful, most innovative company, and the most expensive brand, one of the most popular ones in the world, the best-selling car brand, one of the most advanced and high-tech ones… So we can call it a miracle of the twentieth century! Toyota is the result of creative ideas, all-out efforts, and multiple research works and experiments. It’s a company that started with the automation of a conventional weaving loom and came up with robots and cars with artificial intelligence. Toyota follows the dream and overtakes the “tomorrow”.
So how did it start?
It all started with Sakichi Toyoda, the father of the Toyota’s founder, who invented the weaving loom powered by an electric motor in the late 19th century. Then, he successfully sold a patent for his invention to the British company called Platt Brothers and established Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, which he named after himself to lay a foundation of the entire dynasty. Sakichi’s eldest son, Kiichiro Toyoda, liked toy cars from childhood. When he grew up, he began assembling his own combustion engines. Then he began to buy European and American models of cars and disassemble them for parts. In 1933 at his father’s factory, he opened a car shop, which later produced his cars and the most perfect engines of Kiichiro’s time. Already in 1936, his shop produced his first own Model A1 car and Model G1 truck. The trucks quickly gained popularity, they began to be sold for export, and the Japanese government made a large order for their production. As a result, Kiichiro established his first own car factory in the city of Koromo.
By the way, today the city of Koromo has been renamed Toyota. The car company has been also renamed from Toyoda to Toyota, replacing the letter ‘d’ with ‘t’ because the word ‘Toyota’ uses eight lines in Japanese, and the number 8 in Japanese is considered lucky. So, a third of a century later, the foundation of the loom works, the history of the Toyota car company began, which conquered the entire planet.
The car company has been renamed from Toyoda to Toyota, replacing the letter ‘d’ with ‘t’ because the word ‘Toyota’ uses eight lines in Japanese, and the number 8 in Japanese is considered lucky.
Toyota’s basic principles of production
Toyota cars are popular due to their high quality and availability, made possible by the three basic principles of production:
- kanban: the principle of improving manufacturing efficiency by reducing time, materials, and capacity.
- kaizen: the principle of continuous improvement at every production step.
- ‘just-in-time’: the principle meaning that all the necessary parts and equipment arrive at the assembly site exactly just in time, neither later, nor earlier.
This is the philosophy of Toyota: to surprise and conquer the world.
The company is constantly moving forward - it has never stood still! In addition to cars, Toyota manufactures produce many robots, including medical automation, which help people in their everyday life. And at the moment Toyota is developing a flying car called SkyDrive. Next year it should make its first manned flight.
