Perhaps a Samuari wearing a sombrero (sp?) to symbolize the growth of the company into a multinational corporation.
This thread has been interesting. We've gone from accusing the founder of Toyota of planning the attack on Pearl Harbor to finding all the leters in the Toyota name in the logo itself. Wow! The above items from Toyota sounds like your typical marketing/public info office schtick. Being a marketing major I find their explanation interesting, yet a bit overblown, especially about the background and it being related to "technological advancement" and "boundless opportunities." The logo works very well for them in this way. It is an oval, which is a popular logo container object. Look at the various brands that use ovals as part of their image. My best examples are Ford and Peterbuilt. I bet you can name more. But here is the brilliance. Lexus and Scion share the logo container. Therefore, Toyota has basically tied all of their products back to them with a major shared logo element. The stylized T lives inside the oval for Toyota, but so does the stylized Lexus L and The highly stylized Scion S. I haven't tested this scientifically, but I bet that the proportions of the oval that is used on Toyotas, Leuxuses and Scions is exactly the same. Brilliant brand image control. All the brands have their target markets and identities, but they all point back to the parent, Toyota.
My Avatar is the logo uses for their Formula 1 operations. Combining T, F and 1. Now if Formula 1 starts to use hybrid technology we might see Toyota actually win some races!
"In 1990, Toyota debuted the three overlapping Ellipses logo on American vehicles. The Toyota Ellipses symbolize the unification of the hearts of our customers and the heart of Toyota products. The background space represents Toyota’s technological advancement and the boundless opportunities ahead." Oh brother! What a crock. All Japanese carmakers went to "logo in a circle" variants starting about 15 years ago, followed incompletely by Americans. The worst one is the Mazda, which looks too much like a fat chick bending over. There is an interesting mentality of "me too" to this, as well as to the similar styling trends coming from Japanese competitors. Probably due to similar marketing surveys and stylist's influences. The new Civic borrows a lot from the Prius front, especially around the windshield, though the Prius is by no means the first either.
This has turned out to be quite a varied and interesting posting. M77, can you provide any back up for your elipticle interpretation of the logo? I like that explanation much better than any of the others. An elipse is, after all, simply a circle viewed from the side. And the circle is a symbol that has a long history as one of the deepest and most powerful metaphorical references known to mankind! thanks, storm petrol
No No No. They made it into a stylized "T" so that Americans would stop removing some of the letters to spell "TOY" or "YO".
