President Sato

Among the vehicles on display is the Crown, which this year celebrates its 70th anniversary. What kind of impression does the Crown give you?

This long-selling car has been beloved by our customers over the course of seven decades. The Crown embodies many of Toyota's cherished beliefs about carmaking and the art of craftsmanship, known as monozukuri. I would like to share these with you as we trace the model’s history.

When the Crown first emerged, only foreign cars or trucks could be found on Japanese roads. Against this backdrop, Toyota’s pioneers set out to create a domestic passenger car accessible to all. 

Harnessing all the available technology of the day, in 1955, they created the first-generation Crown.

They were driven by a passion for carmaking and a “customer first” mindset, seeking to create cars for Japanese roads and Japanese users with their own hands. 

These efforts were also underpinned by a spirit of monozukuri, delivering quality cars through creativity and ingenuity, as reflected in the slogan “Good Thinking, Good Products.”

The Crown challenge continued. With the first-generation Crown, Toyota set its sights on the world and ventured to export passenger cars to America for the first time.

Then in 1959, Toyota built Japan’s first dedicated passenger car plant, the Motomachi Plant, taking on the challenges of mass production to deliver cars to more customers.

Since then, through each generation, the Crown has kept evolving to meet the needs of Japanese customers and has been embraced by many.

Yet with every generation, we were also shaping something else: a fixed idea of what a Crown should be, and the shape that it should take.

In fact, like its predecessors, the current 16th generation was also initially planned as an FR sedan. 

When the proposal was made, then-President Toyoda rejected it, noting that “our customers’ values are changing.”

In response, the team returned to the Crown’s origins. Kenya Nakamura, who oversaw the development of that first model, said the following:

“Selling things to people with conviction means creating something that feels good in one’s heart and has within it the true heart of the customer.”

In other words, we must start by envisioning the smiles of our customers, and create something that we believe is good, without being bound by conventions. The development team took these words to heart and carefully considered what the Crown should be.

What they arrived at was a new Crown that ranges from the Sedan to the Crossover, catering to the diverse needs of our customers.

I believe this episode illustrates the things that Toyota values today.

Creating good products with conviction, to make our customers happy. As the history of the Crown teaches us, this is the starting point of Toyota.