Toyota Motor Corporation, better known as Toyota, is a Japanese automobile manufacturing company. It is headquartered in Toyota (Aichi) and Bunkyō (Tokyo) but, because of its multinational character, has factories and locations around the world.

Toyota Motor Corporation was founded in September 1933 when Toyoda Automatic Loom created a new division dedicated to automobile production under the direction of the founder’s son, Kiichiro Toyoda. The first A-engine was produced in 1934 and was first used in May 1935 on the A1 model. Toyota Motor Co. was established as an independent company in 1937.

Toyota began expanding in the 1960s with a new research and development facility. A brand division was created in Thailand. Agreements were also established with Hino Motors and Daihatsu. By the end of the decade, Toyota had internationalized, a fact confirmed by the export of its millionth unit.

Some curiosities about Toyota.

In 2002, it entered into partnership agreements with the French automobile companies Citroën and Peugeot. A year earlier, Toyota had already started producing cars in France.

More recently, in March 2009, Toyota announced a production cut of more than 50%. The only reason was to reduce inventories and cope with falling sales.

At present, the models marketed by the brand are (without including its variants): Auris, Avensis, Aygo, Corolla, Hilux, iQ, Land Cruiser, LC200, Prius, RAV4, Urban Cruiser, Verso and Yaris.

The Toyota group is best known today for its automobiles, but it is still present in the textile business and continues to manufacture automatic looms and electric sewing machines that are available worldwide.

Toyota (トヨタ) is considered luckier than Toyoda (豊田) in Japan, where eight is considered a lucky number, and eight is the number of strokes needed to write Toyota in Katakana. In Chinese, the company and its vehicles are still referred to by equivalent characters (Traditional Chinese: 豐田; Simplified Chinese: 丰田), with Chinese reading.