Toyota is a multinational corporation based in Japan. In 2009, Toyota Motor Corporation employed 71,116 people worldwide; TMC is the world's largest automobile manufacturer by sales and production.
Toyota first started off building small compact cars to suit the Japanese market; exports to other parts of the world were strong especially to the USA. In 1964 the US government introduced the "Chicken Tax" on imported light commercial vehicles. To combat this new Tax the three big Japanese manufacturers opened up factories in the US.
In 1984 Toyota went into a joint venture with General Motors called NUMMI, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc operating an automobile-manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. This helped Toyota launch new brands; most notable is the Lexus division it set up in 1989.
Toyota has grown to a large multinational car manufacturer and expanded to different worldwide markets and countries. It displaced GM and became the world's largest automobile maker for the year 2008.
Along with Honda - Toyota was one of the first car manufacturers to push hybrid vehicles, it was the first to mass produce and sell hybrid vehicles, namely the Prius. Toyota calls the technology in the Prius and its other hybrid range of vehicles "Hybrid Synergy Drive".
As well as a used Toyota in Norfolk you can pick up a new or used Lexus hybrid, the technology in these vehicles is referred to as the "Lexus Hybrid Drive" but it is exactly the same technology used throughout Toyota's model line up.
Recently Toyota celebrated a milestone for the Prius; it had sold 2,000,000 units since its initial inception in 1997. Toyota calculates the Toyota Prius has saved around 11 million tonnes of CO2 emissions compared to petrol models of similar size and power.