Like many other automakers, Toyota did not start out by making cars. The history of the Japanese brand dates back to the mid-20s, when Sakichi Toyoda developed a series of automatic looms, quite advanced for the time.
After his death, the brand abandoned the textile industry and took over the production of motor vehicles (inspired by what was done in the old continent) tooth and nail, which was in charge of his son, Kiichiro Toyoda.
In 1936, the company - which sold its vehicles under the family name Toyoda (with the symbol at the bottom left) – launched a public competition for the creation of the new logo. Among the more than 27 thousand entries, the chosen design turned out to be the three Japanese characters (bottom, center) that together translated “ Toyota “. The brand chose to change the "D" for the "T" in the name because, unlike the family name, this one only needed eight strokes to be written - which corresponds to the Japanese lucky number - and was visually and phonetically simpler .
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A year later, and already with the first model – Toyota AA – circulating on Japanese roads, the Toyota Motor Company was founded.
As early as the 1980s, Toyota began to realize that its logo was unattractive to international markets, which meant that the brand often used the name “Toyota” instead of the traditional insignia. As such, in 1989 Toyota introduced a new logo, which consisted of two perpendicular, overlapping ovals within a larger hoop. Each of these geometric shapes received different contours and thicknesses, similar to the “brush” art from Japanese culture.
Initially, it was thought that this symbol was just a tangle of rings with no historical value, democratically chosen by the brand and whose symbolic value was left to the imagination of each one. It was later concluded that the two perpendicular ovals inside the larger ring represented two hearts – the customer's and the company's – and the outer oval symbolized “the world embracing Toyota”.
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