What Does the Toyota Logo Mean?

Toyota introduced the emblem worldwide in October 1989 to mark its 50th anniversary and to differentiate Toyota from the newly launched Lexus brand. It began to appear on printed material, dealer signage and most vehicles in 1990.

No individual designer is credited in the sources used for this page, and the emblem is presented as a company design. Before this emblem, Toyota had used wordmarks abroad. The archive shows a thin serif TOYOTA in 1958, bold black sans-serif capitals in 1969 and a red wordmark in 1978. The archive's 2005 version adds a chrome finish like the badge on a physical car, and the 2020 version is flat graphite with no wordmark.

The earliest mark in the archive is a hexagonal badge spelling TOYODA, dated 1935, from the years when vehicles were still sold under the family name. The company grew out of the Toyoda family's loom business, and Kiichiro Toyoda set up the automobile division in 1933.

The photo shows the 1936 Model AA sedan with that badge displayed behind it. At that time the name on the badge and the name on the company were about to change.

In 1936 the company ran a public competition for a new mark and received about 27,000 entries. The red circle in the archive holds three angular katakana characters with small speed-line marks, and the same year the spelling changed from Toyoda to Toyota. The winner's name is not given in the sources used here.

Rizaburo Toyoda, who married into the family and became the first president, preferred the spelling Toyota. It takes eight brush strokes in Japanese, a lucky number, and the unvoiced consonant looks simpler and sounds clearer. Since toyoda literally means fertile rice paddies, the change also avoided a link to old-fashioned farming. Toyota still uses the katakana mark as its corporate emblem in Japan, including on its headquarters building.