Toyota

• 1. Introduction

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  Toyota Motor Corporation had built 300 million vehicles by September 2023. It was the first car maker ever to pass 10 million in a single year, a mark it reached in 2012. That same year it announced its 200 millionth vehicle. Today the company is headquartered in Toyota City, in Aichi, Japan, and it ranks as the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. Yet it grew out of a family business that did not start with cars. The name on the cars even differs by one letter from the family's own. This documentary asks how a small prototype program became a global giant. It asks how the company learned to build cars so efficiently that other manufacturers wanted to study it. It asks why a firm celebrated for pioneering hybrids is also criticized for moving slowly toward fully electric ones. And it asks what happened when its reputation for reliability was tested in public.

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• 2. From Loom To Truck

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  In 1924, Sakichi Toyoda invented the Toyoda Model G Automatic loom, a machine built to stop itself whenever something went wrong. That idea is called jidoka, and it later became part of the Toyota Production System. In 1929, the patent for the loom was sold to the British company Platt Brothers. The sale produced the starting capital for building automobiles.

  Sakichi's son, Kiichiro Toyoda, directed the move into cars. On the 1st of September 1933, Toyoda Automatic Loom Works set up an Automobile Division. On the 29th of January 1934, it formally declared its intention to manufacture automobiles. A prototype Type A engine was finished on the 25th of September 1934. The first prototype sedan, the A1, followed the next May.

  The government had other priorities. It strongly favored the development of trucks, so the young division turned its attention to the G1. That truck was completed on the 25th of August 1935 and debuted in Tokyo on the 21st of November. It became the company's first production model. Its design followed a Ford truck of the period, yet the G1 chassis sold for 2,900 yen, which was 200 yen cheaper. In the end only 379 were built.

  In April 1936, the first passenger car, the Model AA, was completed. Its price of 3,350 yen undercut Ford and GM cars by 400 yen. The plant at Kariya was finished in May. In July, the company filled its first export order: four G1 trucks bound for northeastern China. On the 19th of September 1936, the Japanese imperial government officially designated the loom company as an automotive manufacturer. The vehicles were still being sold under the family's original spelling, and that was about to change.

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• 3. Fertile Rice Paddies

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  In September 1936, the company asked the public to design its new logo, and 27,000 entries came in. The winner was three Japanese katakana letters spelling "Toyoda", set inside a circle. But Rizaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with the name, preferred "Toyota".

  He had three reasons. Written in Japanese, "Toyota" takes eight brush strokes, and eight is a lucky number. It was visually simpler because it drops the diacritic mark at the end. And it swaps a voiced consonant for a voiceless one. Voiced consonants are considered "murky" or "muddy", while voiceless ones sound "clear". There was a fourth benefit too. Toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies", so the change kept the company from sounding like old-fashioned farming.

  The new word was trademarked, and the company began trading on the 28th of August 1937 as the Toyota Motor Company Ltd. Rizaburo, who was Kiichiro's brother-in-law, became the first president, with Kiichiro as vice-president. The loom works formally transferred its automobile manufacturing to the new entity on the 29th of September. Toyota celebrates its founding every the 3rd of November, a date chosen because the Koromo Plant was inaugurated on that day in 1938.

  The Japanese government backed the new firm by preventing Ford and General Motors from importing automobiles. When World War II began, Toyota almost exclusively built standard-sized trucks for the Japanese Army. The Army paid one-fifth of the price in advance and the rest in cash on delivery.

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• 4. Ruin And Reinvention

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  On the 14th of August 1945, one day before Japan's surrender, Allied forces bombed Toyota's Koromo Plant. The U.S.-led occupation then banned passenger car production. Automakers could still build trucks for civilian use, to help rebuild the nation's infrastructure, and the U.S. military hired Toyota to repair its vehicles.

  By 1947, the Cold War was taking shape between the Soviet Union and the United States. American priorities shifted in what became known as the "Reverse Course", away from punishing Japan and toward political stability and economic recovery. In 1949, Japanese automakers were allowed to build passenger cars again. But a new economic stabilization program, meant to control inflation, left the auto industry desperately short of funds. Many truck owners defaulted on their loans. The Bank of Japan, the country's central bank, bailed Toyota out and demanded reforms.

  Toyota entered the 1950s smaller than before, having closed factories and laid off workers. Then the Korean War broke out, and the U.S. Army ordered 1,000 trucks from a company located so close to the fighting. That order rapidly lifted Toyota's fortunes.

  In 1950, executives including Kiichiro's cousin, Eiji Toyoda, traveled to the United States. They trained at the Ford Motor Company and observed the operations of dozens of American manufacturers. What they learned, combined with the company's experience making looms, gave rise to the Toyota Way, a management philosophy. It also produced the Toyota Production System, a lean manufacturing practice that transformed Toyota into an industry leader.

  Kiichiro Toyoda died suddenly on the 27th of March 1952. For years he had championed a full-fledged passenger car, the Toyopet Crown, and development began that same year. Until then Toyota had outsourced its car bodies and mounted them on its own truck frames. The Crown needed a new body and a new chassis, comfortable yet tough enough for Japan's muddy, slow, unpaved roads. Prototypes were finished in June 1953, and the Crown went on sale in August 1955 to positive reviews from around the world.

  Exports followed quickly. In 1955, Land Cruisers reached Saudi Arabia under an agreement with Abdul Latif Jameel, and Yemen received them in 1956. In 1958, Toyota opened a production facility in Brazil, its first outside Japan.

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• 5. A Toy In America

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  James F. McGraw joined Toyota Motor Sales, USA in 1959 as its first sales administrator, and he spoke bluntly to his new Japanese supervisors. "'Toy' sounds like a toy and toys break," he told them. Toyota had entered the American market the year before with the Toyopet Crown. For the first time, the company had to face how its name sounded to native English speakers.

  The Crown was a flop. American buyers found it overpriced and underpowered. It had been designed for endurance on the bad roads of Japan, not for high speeds on the good roads of America. In the early 1960s, Crown exports to the United States were suspended in favor of the Land Cruiser and the Tiara.

  The recovery came in 1965 with the Corona compact, redesigned specifically for America with a more powerful engine. U.S. sales rose to more than 20,000 units in 1966, a threefold increase. By 1967, Toyota was the third-best-selling import brand in the country.

  In 1972, Toyota struck a deal with Atlas Fabricators to make truck beds in Long Beach. The goal was to dodge a 25 percent "chicken tax" on imported light trucks. Shipped as an incomplete chassis cab, with no bed, a truck faced a tariff of only 4 percent. Atlas then built the beds and attached them in the United States. The arrangement worked so well that Toyota bought Atlas two years later.

  The energy crisis of the 1970s changed what Americans wanted to drive. Large, heavy cars with powerful but inefficient engines had been common. Afterward, shoppers demanded high-quality, fuel-efficient small cars. Detroit's automakers struggled to build them profitably, while Toyota was well positioned. That success, along with growing anti-Japanese sentiment, led the U.S. Congress to consider import restrictions.

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• 6. Oil And Water

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  In 1981, Japan agreed to voluntary export restraints that capped the number of vehicles it would send to the United States each year. Toyota responded by building assembly plants in North America. The U.S. government also closed the loophole that let Toyota pay lower taxes by building truck beds on American soil.

  That same year, Eiji Toyoda stepped down as president and became chairman. Shoichiro Toyoda, the founder's son, took his place. Since 1950 the company had been split into Toyota Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Sales Co. Within months, Shoichiro began merging the two, and in 1982 they became the Toyota Motor Corporation. People described the two groups as "oil and water". It took years of leadership from Shoichiro to turn them into one organization.

  Toyota's search for an American factory began in 1980 with a proposed joint venture with Ford. Those talks collapsed in July 1981. In 1984, Toyota instead agreed with General Motors to open NUMMI, short for New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., in Fremont, California. GM wanted access to a quality small car and a chance to study the Toyota Way and the Toyota Production System. Toyota gained its first North American manufacturing base, protection from future import tariffs, and a partner who could explain the American labor environment. Tatsuro Toyoda, the younger brother of Shoichiro, led the plant. The first Toyota assembled in America, a white Corolla, rolled off the line on the 7th of October 1986.

  Meanwhile, a secret project had been running since August 1983. Toyota's flagship models, the Crown and the Century, sold only in Japan and could not compete with Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Jaguar. So the company spent more than US$1 billion developing a luxury brand called Lexus. Its flagship, the LS 400, debuted in 1989 to strong sales and was largely responsible for the brand's successful launch. Japanese customers did not see the Lexus name on a showroom floor until 2005.

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• 7. The Hybrid Gamble

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  December 1997 brought the first-generation Toyota Prius, the first mass-produced gasoline-electric hybrid car. For its first two years it was built exclusively for the Japanese market, and exports began in August 2000. The company's hybrid technology, called Hybrid Synergy Drive, spread first to the Camry and then to Lexus. By January 2020, Toyota sold 44 hybrid passenger car models in over 90 countries and regions. It had sold over 15 million hybrids since 1997, and the Prius family alone had reached almost 4 million units by January 2017.

  The numbers for 2025 show how lopsided the lineup remains. Toyota and Lexus sold 4,433,503 hybrid electric vehicles, against 199,137 battery electric vehicles. Only 1,257 vehicles ran on hydrogen fuel cells.

  Hydrogen has been Toyota's other bet. The Toyota Mirai, whose name is Japanese for "future", was unveiled at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2014. Sales in Japan began that December, and American retail sales started in California in August 2015. In 2015, Toyota released 5,600 patents for free use until 2020, hoping to spur global development of the technology.

  Battery electric cars arrived reluctantly. The first RAV4 EV was a compliance car, built after California's Air Resources Board required every automaker to offer a zero-emissions vehicle. A total of 1,484 were leased or sold in California between 1997 and 2003. In late 2012, vice chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada said electric vehicles "do not meet society's needs", and Toyota backed away from them. In December 2020, chief executive Akio Toyoda called electric cars excessively "hyped". He argued that switching Japan entirely to them would cost millions of jobs.

  The tone shifted in December 2021, when Toyota announced plans for 30 battery-electric models by 2030 and a sales target of 3.5 million per year. The announcement came with an investment of $70 billion. Then, in June 2022, it recalled 2,700 of its first mass-produced all-electric vehicles, the bZ4X. The wheel bolts could loosen until a wheel simply detached from the car.

  Toyota is now developing solid-state batteries with Panasonic. It held more than a thousand related patents by late 2020, and it hopes the technology could raise battery electric efficiency by 30 percent.

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• 8. Recalls And Reckonings

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  In November 2009, Toyota began the first of its unintended-acceleration recalls, aimed at a front driver's side floor mat that could slide into the pedal well and trap the pedals. A second recall in January 2010 followed after some crashes were shown not to be caused by floor mats. The suspected culprit then became possible mechanical sticking of the accelerator pedal. Under pressure from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, roughly 9 million cars and trucks were recalled worldwide.

  The agency received reports of 37 deaths allegedly related to unintended acceleration, though the exact number was never verified. Toyota faced nearly 100 lawsuits from families of the dead, injured drivers, owners who lost resale value, and investors. Most injury and wrongful death suits were settled confidentially. The company spent more than US$1 billion to settle a class action over resale value. It also agreed to a US$1.2 billion criminal penalty over accusations that it had hidden information about safety defects and made deceptive statements to protect its brand image. That was the largest penalty ever levied against a car company.

  Amid the scandal, president Katsuaki Watanabe stepped down. On the 23rd of June 2009, Akio Toyoda, grandson of Kiichiro, took the job. He had been with Toyota since 1984 and joined the board in 2000. His promotion was the first return of a Toyoda family member to the top role since 1999.

  More bills arrived. In November 2016, Toyota agreed to pay $3.4 billion over roughly one-and-a-half million Tacoma, Tundra and Sequoia vehicles whose frames were prone to corrosion. Toyota was also affected by the Takata airbag recall, in which inflators can explode and send metal fragments into the cabin. In 2003, it was fined $34 million for violating the Clean Air Act, as 2.2 million vehicles carried defective smog-control computers. In January 2021 it was fined $180 million for delays in reporting emissions defects to the Environmental Protection Agency, then the biggest civil penalty of its kind.

  There was a human cost inside the company as well. On the 9th of February 2002, Kenichi Uchino, a 30-year-old quality control manager, collapsed and died at work. In 2006, the 45-year-old chief engineer of the Camry Hybrid died of heart failure in his bed.

  The company's reach brought odder questions. In 2015, U.S. officials asked Toyota how the Islamic State had come to own so many of its trucks. Toyota answered that it cannot track aftermarket sales and that it bars sales to buyers who might use vehicles for paramilitary or terrorist activities.

  Akio Toyoda would hold the top job until January 2023, when he announced he was passing it to Koji Sato, a former head of Lexus. The change took effect on the 1st of April 2023.

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