Toyota Trivia
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This Toyota trivia quiz has 46 free questions with answers and covers the company from Sakichi Toyoda's automatic looms and the 1937 founding through the Corolla, Prius, Land Cruiser, Hilux, Camry, RAV4 and Supra, the birth of Lexus, the Toyota Production System that gave the world lean manufacturing, the US plants and the 2009-11 recall crisis, and Toyota's long road to victory at Le Mans, the WRC and NASCAR. It works for car-club nights, dealership team quizzes and anyone who has owned a Corolla and wondered why it says 'Toyota' rather than 'Toyoda' on the badge. Questions run from easy brand facts to expert production and motorsport history. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which member of the Toyoda family founded Toyota Motor in 1937?
Kiichiro
Kiichiro Toyoda established Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. on 28 August 1937, spinning the car business out of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, the company his father Sakichi had founded in 1926.
Q 02Why did Toyota's founders respell the family name 'Toyoda' for their car company in 1936?
Eight brush strokes are lucky
Eight brush strokes are lucky, tied to wealth and good fortune, and 'Toyota' in katakana takes exactly eight; the company adds that its 't' was judged a clearer sound than the 'd' in Toyoda.
Q 03Patent rights to Sakichi Toyoda's automatic loom were sold in 1929 to a firm in which country?
United Kingdom
United Kingdom: Platt Brothers of Oldham, once the world's largest maker of textile machinery, agreed to pay £100,000 for rights to the self-stopping loom, money often said to have seeded the family's car venture.
Q 04What was Toyota's first passenger car, completed in April 1936?
The Model AA
The Model AA, a six-cylinder sedan whose streamlined styling borrowed from the Chrysler Airflow, was completed in April 1936 as the firm's first production passenger car, following the A1 prototype of 1935.
Q 05What was Toyota's home city in Aichi Prefecture called before it took the company's name in 1959?
Koromo
Koromo renamed itself on 1 January 1959 because of its biggest employer's fame, then twinned with Detroit, America's motor city, a year later.
Q 06Which two engineers developed the Toyota Production System between 1948 and 1975?
Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda
Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda shaped the Toyota Production System between 1948 and 1975 around two pillars, just-in-time and jidoka, and it later inspired the wider idea of lean manufacturing.
Q 07The Toyota Production System's just-in-time approach was famously inspired by what?
Supermarket shelves
Supermarket shelves, not Detroit's car plants, gave Toyota the model: staff restock only what shoppers take, so each work station makes only what the next one has used.
Q 08Which Japanese word for 'continuous improvement' is central to Toyota's philosophy?
Kaizen
Kaizen has American roots: the practice grew out of methods that US advisers taught Japanese industry during the rebuilding after World War II, which Toyota then made its own.
Q 09Which root-cause technique did Sakichi Toyoda pioneer?
The 5 Whys
The 5 Whys traces a fault back by asking 'why?' again and again, so the fix hits the root cause rather than a symptom; Toyota teaches it to recruits as part of their induction.
Q 10Since 1997 the best-selling car nameplate of all time has been which Toyota?
Corolla
The Corolla, sold across twelve generations since 1966, overtook the Volkswagen Beetle as the best-selling nameplate and passed 50 million cumulative sales in July 2021.
Q 11The name of Toyota's best-selling compact comes from the Latin for what?
Small crown
Small crown is the Latin meaning, from a diminutive of corona; Toyota was carrying on a run of crown-themed car names begun by its Crown saloon.
Q 12Which Toyota, launched in Japan in 1997, has a Latin name meaning 'before'?
Prius
Prius is Latin for 'before' or 'earlier'; Toyota built it as its 'car for the 21st century' and beat the century to market with the world's first mass-produced petrol-electric car.
Q 13What does Toyota call its technology that blends a petrol engine with electric motors?
Hybrid Synergy Drive
Hybrid Synergy Drive links engine and motors through a planetary gearset that acts like a continuously variable transmission, so the car can pull away on electric power alone.
Q 21Toyota's car plant at Georgetown, which built its first vehicle in May 1988, is in which US state?
Kentucky
Kentucky won the plant after Governor Martha Layne Collins made several trade missions to Japan and offered incentives that survived a court challenge; the first car rolled out in May 1988.
Q 22Two open-top Toyota 2000GT sports cars were specially built for which 1967 James Bond film?
You Only Live Twice
You Only Live Twice was shot largely in Japan; the roofless cars were reportedly made in under two weeks because Sean Connery was too tall for the coupé's low roof.
Q 23What did the name RAV4 originally stand for?
Q 14Which is Toyota's longest-running model series, in production since 1951?
Land Cruiser
The Land Cruiser began in 1951 as the Toyota 'Jeep' BJ, built when the Korean War created demand for military utility vehicles; it took its present name in 1954 after Willys objected to 'Jeep'.
Q 15In 2012 a stock Toyota Tundra pickup towed which space shuttle across a Los Angeles freeway bridge?
Endeavour
Endeavour was too heavy for its usual transporters to cross the bridge over Interstate 405 on the way to its Los Angeles museum, so it rode a lighter dolly pulled by an unmodified Tundra.
Q 16The name of the Hilux pickup, launched in 1968, is a blend of which two words?
High and luxury
High and luxury make 'Hilux', a bold name for a work truck: it was a luxury only beside Toyota's spartan Stout pickup, and the first 1968 model was engineered and built by Hino.
Q 17Which Toyota pickup replaced the Hilux in North America in 1995?
Tacoma
The Tacoma was tuned for ride comfort, handling and safety rather than sheer toughness, because North American buyers used small pickups as everyday cars more than as work trucks.
Q 18Toyota's luxury brand Lexus launched in the US in 1989 with which flagship sedan?
The LS 400
The LS 400 arrived with a TV advert in which a pyramid of champagne glasses stood on its bonnet, unspilled, while the engine ran the car up to the equivalent of 145 mph.
Q 19What was Lexus's original marketing slogan?
The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
'The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection' was coined after the ad team visited Lexus engineers in Japan and saw their obsession with detail; 'Experience Amazing' replaced the Pursuit line in 2017.
Q 20Toyota's youth-oriented North American brand, launched in 2003 and closed in 2016, was called what?
Scion
Scion went on sale in California in June 2003 to win over younger buyers; when Toyota closed it in 2016, its surviving models were simply rebadged as Toyotas.
Recreational Active Vehicle 4-wheel drive
Recreational Active Vehicle 4-wheel drive was the meaning at the 1994 launch; built on car rather than truck underpinnings, the RAV4 is widely credited with starting the compact crossover class.
Q 24Which electric carmaker helped Toyota build the second-generation RAV4 EV in 2012?
Tesla
Tesla supplied the battery and motor under a deal struck in 2010, when Toyota bought $50 million of the young firm's shares; the electric RAV4 was sold only in California.
Q 25The Supra's name comes from a Latin prefix meaning what?
Above or beyond
Above or beyond is the sense of the Latin 'supra'; the fifth generation, launched in 2019, was built in Graz, Austria, on the same line as its engineering twin, the BMW Z4.
Q 26Which film stars a rebuilt Supra?
The Fast and the Furious
The Fast and the Furious has undercover cop Brian O'Conner bring a wrecked Supra to Dom Toretto's garage to square the 'ten-second car' he owes; restored, it races Dom's Dodge Charger in the finale.
Q 27Mirai, the name of Toyota's hydrogen fuel-cell car, means what in Japanese?
Future
Future is what 'mirai' means; a fuel cell turns hydrogen into electricity on board, so the only thing the car's tailpipe emits is water.
Q 28Akio Toyoda, president from 2009 to 2023, races under which pseudonym?
Morizo
Morizo shares his name with the 'forest grandfather' mascot of the 2005 Aichi Expo; racing as Morizo, Toyota's boss crashed the first GR Yaris prototype on a midwinter test in Hokkaido.
Q 29Toyota's factory Formula One team competed from 2002 to 2009 with what result?
It never won a race
It never won a race in 139 starts, despite one of the biggest budgets in Formula One; five second places were its best results, and fourth in the 2005 constructors' table its best season.
Q 30Which Formula One champion shared Toyota's first Le Mans win in 2018?
Fernando Alonso
Fernando Alonso won with Sébastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima, two years after Nakajima's leading Toyota lost power in the closing minutes and handed Porsche the win.