Hahaha, I was putting my splash gaurd back under my engine bay and right when i was getting out, I noticed my steering box is spelled in JDM hehehe
pretty close but no cigar. from your link actually its... from wikipiedia you can also find a more in depth story on toyota.com. where they talk about how toyoda jr. went and spoke with a psychic then decieded to change the name to sound better. supposedly that same psychic is responsible for the car names that start with a C, for good luck or something.
Super great history lesson there, I knew Ide heard about it, but never really read that far into it. Im back in class, I love learnig new things, great find, great info and super kewl . . .
toyoda automated loom works is still in business. they make all kinds of **** http://www.answers.com/topic/toyoda-automatic-loom-works-ltd
Toyoda was made into Toyota because: Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichiro Toyoda. In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Out of 27,000 entries the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. But Risaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a fortuitous number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off two ticks at the end) and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonant is considered "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to the voiceless consonant, which is "clear"). Since "Toyoda" literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also helped to distance the company from associations with old fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the "Toyota Motor Company". In predominantly Chinese speaking countries using traditional Chinese characters (eg Hong Kong, Taiwan), Toyota is known as '豊田'. In predominantly Chinese speaking countries using simplified Chinese characters (eg China), Toyota is known as '丰田' (pronounced as 'Fēngtián' in the Mandarin Chinese dialect). These are the same characters as the founding family's name "Toyoda" in Japanese, which translate to "fertile rice paddies" in the Chinese language as well.
