As rumors are milling around about Toyota making its comeback as the top selling automaker in the world, they have reached a significant milestone in their history with their 200,000,000th vehicle off the assembly line and ready to be adopted by a new Toyota driver. This landmark event only took 76 years and eleven months. Who would’ve known back when Toyota first started building cars in 1935 that it would come so far? The first 10 million vehicles took until 1972 to build, of course out of that 36 year time span there were interruptions such as World War II. Toyota has never been a company to rest on its laurels though and the next forty years and five months after the 10 millionth car came out production was able to be ramped up enough to produce the next 190 million vehicles.
While 200 million is a pretty impossible number to imagine all those cars in a huge parking lot, it helps to compare. General Motor’s celebrated their 75th anniversary and had built 235 million cars by that time, so just few million over what Toyota has done with the extra year or so in business.
Out of the 200 million vehicles now out, 145.21 million vehicles were produced in Tokyo and the remaining 55.12 million vehicles have been produced at Toyota plants overseas.
TMC President Akio Toyoda said: “I wish to express my heartfelt appreciation to our customers the world over who made it possible for us to reach this milestone. I also have the most profound respect and gratitude for the efforts of all persons who were involved in developing, manufacturing, and marketing Toyota and Lexus vehicles over the years. We are determined to make our cars even better, to continue to give our customers the best possible product. This is the common goal of our 300,000 Toyota staff members worldwide.”
News Source: Toyota