Toyota Motor Corporation

Toyota's origins lie in the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, founded by Sakichi Toyoda in 1926. Sakichi invented an automatic power loom that stopped itself when a thread broke — a simple innovation that dramatically improved textile quality and efficiency. He sold the patent rights to the British company Platt Brothers for £100,000 in 1929 — a sum that his son Kiichiro used to fund research into automobile manufacturing. The loom patent literally paid for the car company.

Kiichiro Toyoda founded Toyota Motor Corporation as a separate entity from the loom business in 1937. The name was changed from Toyoda to Toyota — partly for marketing reasons, partly because Toyota requires fewer brush strokes in Japanese and was considered luckier. Toyota's first passenger car, the Model AA, was produced in 1936. The company was nearly destroyed by postwar occupation policies that briefly banned passenger car production, and by the 1950 Korean War recession that forced Toyota to lay off a third of its workforce — a labour dispute that shaped Toyota's management philosophy permanently.

Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System in the 1950s — a manufacturing philosophy built around the elimination of waste (muda), just-in-time production, and the empowerment of workers to stop the production line when they identified defects. The system was inspired partly by American supermarkets, where shelves were restocked based on actual consumption rather than production schedules. The Toyota Production System became the foundation of lean manufacturing and influenced virtually every major manufacturing company in the world over the following decades.

Toyota launched the Prius in Japan in December 1997 — the world's first mass-produced hybrid electric vehicle. The development programme had been accelerated after Toyota's chairman challenged engineers to build a car for the 21st century in half the normal development time. Engineers worked 24-hour shifts. The original Prius was not profitable. Toyota priced it below cost to build market share and demonstrate technological leadership. Over 15 million Priuses had been sold by 2020, making it the best-selling hybrid vehicle in history and establishing Toyota as the leader in low-emissions automotive technology.

Toyota recalled approximately 10 million vehicles between 2009 and 2011 over concerns about unintended acceleration, sticky accelerator pedals, and floor mat interference. The scale of the recalls — combined with Toyota's initially slow response and apparent attempt to minimise the issue — was the most damaging crisis in the company's history. U.S. Congressional hearings were televised. Toyota paid $1.2 billion to settle U.S. Department of Justice charges in 2014. The company that had built its reputation on quality and reliability spent years repairing the damage to that reputation.