Toyota

Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese automaker, headquartered in Toyota City in Aichi Prefecture, that designs, builds and sells cars, trucks and other vehicles under the Toyota and Lexus brands. It dates its founding to August 28, 1937. In 2025 Toyota again led the world in vehicle sales, for the sixth year in a row, counting the wider Toyota group that includes Daihatsu and Hino Motors. The company is also known for the Toyota Production System, a way of organizing factory work that has been studied well beyond the car industry.

History of Toyota

Toyota began in textile machinery, not cars. Sakichi Toyoda (1867 to 1930) was an inventor of looms, and his Type-G automatic loom of 1924 was the first with a non-stop shuttle-change motion. Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was established in 1926 and is known today as Toyota Industries Corporation.

Sakichi’s son Kiichiro Toyoda moved the business toward automobiles. He began automotive research in 1930, and in January 1934 the loom company decided to enter the industry. A prototype passenger car, the Model A1, was finished in 1935, and the Model AA passenger car entered production in 1936. In September 1937 the company adopted the spelling Toyota for its logo and products after a public suggestion process.

Toyota was designated a munitions company in 1944, and after the war it rebuilt around trucks and then passenger cars. In 1961 it decided to adopt Total Quality Control company-wide, a quality management method.

Toyota Motor and its separate sales company, Toyota Motor Sales, merged on July 1, 1982 to form Toyota Motor Corporation as it exists today. The decade also brought a joint venture with General Motors in California and the launch of Lexus, whose first models reached U.S. dealers in 1989. In October 1997 Toyota launched the first Prius, a hybrid car that pairs a gasoline engine with an electric motor.

Products and brands of Toyota

According to its company profile, Toyota’s main business is motor vehicle production and sales. The lineup runs from compact cars such as the Corolla and family sedans such as the Camry to the Prius hybrid and utility vehicles such as the Land Cruiser and the Hilux pickup, both of which Toyota has relaunched in new versions in Japan since 2024. Lexus is the luxury brand. Daihatsu and Hino Motors, a maker of commercial vehicles in which Toyota acquired a majority of shares in 2001, belong to the wider group.

Toyota also operates outside vehicle manufacturing. Its own history site lists financial services, housing, and industrial vehicles and equipment among its non-automotive businesses. Hybrids such as the Prius were an early step toward electrified driving, a category that now also includes the battery-powered electric vehicle.

As of March 31, 2026, Toyota Motor Corporation had 73,133 employees on its own and 390,927 on a consolidated basis, which counts its subsidiaries as well. Its capital stood at 635 billion yen. According to Nippon.com, the Toyota group sold 10,327,976 vehicles worldwide from January to November 2025, up 4.8 percent from a year earlier, compared with 8,983,900 for Volkswagen Group over all of 2025.

The Toyota Production System

The Toyota Production System, or TPS, is a manufacturing approach built on removing waste so that vehicles reach customers quickly, at low cost and with high quality. Toyota describes it as resting on two pillars, jidoka and just-in-time, and as being driven by daily small improvements known as kaizen.

Jidoka can be translated as automation with a human touch. A machine, or a worker pulling a stop cord, halts the line the moment something goes wrong, and an andon board lights up to show where. The point is that defects are stopped at the source instead of passing down the line. Kaizen targets three kinds of inefficiency that Toyota calls muda (waste), mura (unevenness) and muri (overburden).

The second pillar, just-in-time, means making only what is needed, when it is needed, in the amount needed. A car contains more than 30,000 parts, many made by outside suppliers, so plants must work in step. Each process keeps a small store of parts and refills what the next process takes. This loop is the basis of just-in-time inventory, which cuts the stock a manufacturer must carry, and it makes the whole arrangement depend on a well-run supply chain.

Toyota traces the system to Sakichi Toyoda’s automatic loom, which built judgment into the machine so that it stopped when a thread broke. Kiichiro Toyoda developed the just-in-time idea for car production. Eiji Toyoda and the engineer Taiichi Ohno later turned these ideas into the system that let Toyota compete directly with European and American makers. Its waste-cutting logic has since influenced other fields, including lean construction.

Toyota worldwide

Toyota reached an annual export volume of 10,000 vehicles in 1961, and by 1962 it was assembling vehicles through partners and subsidiaries in countries such as Thailand, South Africa, the Philippines and Australia. In 1981 Japan imposed voluntary limits on passenger car exports to the United States, and the restraints stayed in place until March 1984. That pressure encouraged local production in North America, beginning with the New United Motor Manufacturing joint venture (NUMMI), which was established with General Motors in February 1984 and began building the Chevrolet Nova that December.

Toyota later added wholly owned plants in Kentucky and Canada. NUMMI itself ended when General Motors announced its withdrawal in June 2009 and Toyota announced in August that it would end its production contract. In Europe, Toyota set up a regional holding company in 2002 and has plants in France and Poland. Nippon.com reports that exports to the United States account for about 30 percent of Toyota’s overall exports.

The official headquarters is in Toyota City, with additional head offices in Tokyo and Nagoya, in Toyota’s home country of Japan.

Recalls and controversies

Toyota’s best-documented difficulty is the unintended acceleration crisis of 2009 and 2010. The company recalled nearly 8 million vehicles in the United States after drivers reported cars speeding up without their input, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) linked the problem to at least 50 reported deaths. NHTSA identified two mechanical defects: accelerator pedals that could stick, and a design flaw that let floor mats trap the pedal.

Toyota’s president testified at a U.S. congressional hearing in February 2010. Because some consumers blamed electronics, NHTSA asked NASA engineers to examine the vehicles’ electronic and software systems. NASA announced in February 2011 that it had found no evidence that an electronics malfunction caused large unintended accelerations.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue