We brought you Mazda on our first In Focus segment, now we are giving you the world's current largest automaker, Toyota.
The Japanese car maker belongs to the multinational Toyota Motor Corporation, owned and founded by the Toyoda family. Wondering why Toyota and their family name sound almost the same? It is because they just changed the "D" to "T" because they consider writing Toyota luckier than Toyoda due to its eight strokes when writing it in Japanese.
Toyota started around 1934 and built their first passenger car in 1936. However, their activities are only limited to their country. During the World War II, Toyota is solely dedicated in making trucks for the Japanese Army. After the war, they started building commercial passenger vehicles. In 1957, they shipped their first ever car in the United States, the Toyota Crown. By the end of the 60's, Toyota had already gone global.
Toyota had gone a long way since then. They innovated a lot of new things for the car industry. They initiated researches for the better comfortability and better driving of customers. They also made their commitment to held saving the world from the pollution brought about by the car they themselves made by creating Green cars - electric types, ethanol , plug-in hybrids and even solar cars. The company even dedicated its own farm producing corns for use as ethanol. There are various models of Toyota cars that are in line with their hybrid series, the Toyota Prius for example. It uses different types of energy for different models. There are Prius that uses ethanol, some uses electricity, and future Prius-es will be runned by Hydrogen fuel.
The company now holds about 522 subsidiaries and still growing. There is really no stopping them. In the recent years, we have seen how great they have become with advancing to modern technology and applying it to their cars. They have beaten the record of GM's reigning for the last 77 years.
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