Toyotas Everywhere? Just Look At These Production Figures!
Well, it took Toyota 76 years and 11 months to achieve it, but in June 2012, its worldwide cumulative production figures topped 200 million vehicles.
Starting way back in 1935 at Toyoda Automatic Loom Works Ltd.’s Automotive Department, and beginning with its first vehicle, a model G1 truck, and a prototype saloon car it soon became clear that building cars and vans was going to be a might lucrative thing to do and in 1937, the Toyota Motor Corporation was formed. Things wouldn’t however be easy for Toyota and the war years were difficult for the young company who switched its production to building simple trucks for the Japanese military and despite returning to car production in 1947, the young company needed loans to keep it alive, but by June 1950 Toyota had produced only 300 trucks and were in danger of going under. Wage reductions and laying staff off lead to strikes although an agreement was reached which also saw the resignation of the companies President Kiichiro Toyoda. Ironically, another war, the one in Korea which saw Toyota pick up an order for over 5,000 vehicles and the company was saved.
It was all upwards from there, with Toyota today being the world’s biggest car manufacture and not only in terms of sales and production, but also financially and in fact, Toyota is also the ninth wealthiest company in the world “in any industry”. Employing over 316,000 staff and in 2011, seeing revenue of $235.8 billion, Toyota are clearly here to stay and the number of vehicles they’ve made so far is clearly going to grow and grow, but 200 million is a pretty good thing to shout about at the moment. There are different ways of measuring who’s the biggest, but purely, in hard cash terms, Toyota could buy most of its competition out of petty cash.
Toyota operate plants all over the world, but from a European perspective, they have facilities in the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, France, Portugal, Russia and Turkey and across those plants, and at the end of 2011, the cumulative production figure for Europe stood at 7.44 million vehicles.
We love the Toyota brand and yes it could be argued that they are not exciting (ala Clarkson) but fact is, I’ve never driven a modern Toyota I wouldn’t have been happy to live with on a permanent basis, apart from of course the Prius which I can never make work as it claims, but was however the third best selling car worldwide in the first 3 months of 2012, with homes being found for 247,000 of the things, so what do I know.
