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A trip to the Toyota City

On the 3rd of November, I had a trip to the Toyota City along with my friends. Toyota City is the headquarters of currently world's largest automobile manufacturer, Toyota. As the day was a Japanese holiday, we had planned for the tour quite earlier. We were informed that the tour is conducted everyday by Toyota management & is absolutely free. But I had always a question of why, why a powerful business house like Toyota would conduct such a free trip! Anyway, we left very early with the idea of reaching the Toyota City through a single journey of subway. But alas, we had to change three trains, two of them being the Meitetsu trains. And it was only then when I really got a first idea of the outskirts of Nagoya City. Toyota City is about 45 mins of journey from the most of the Nagoya city subway lines. I should mention the nearest train station in fact, as we did not find any train line directly linking to the Toyota City from Nagoya. After we got down at the Toyohashi station, we had to board in a minibus to reach the Toyota City. The city though not like Nagoya in terms of skycrapers, is scenic. After arrival, we started towards the Toyota reception center for the tourists. The receptionist were well trained in English speaking, which is a rare case in Japan. There were two big halls in that building's ground floor. The hall at the entry has one robot & one 'i-unit' concept car on display. The other hall has all the latest models from different Toyota brands like Lexus, Land Cruiser, RAV4, Prius, Camry etc on display. And the small side halls have different concept car models, giant display screens displaying Toyota manufacturing processes and above all the F1 car. There were two of those cars.
We were told that we would be leaving for a short trip to a Toyota manufacturing plant at 11:00 AM. So, we boarded into a bus at the specified time, were given tourist badge, informed to leave the cell phone & camera in the bus itself once we get out of the bus inside the plant. The bus was full of foreigners. During the bus journey of 20 mins, the lady guide had given a brief introduction about the Toyota Motor Corporation. The best thing I came to know that time is why the company name is Toyota & not Toyoda(family name of the founder Kiichiro Toyoda). There are three reasons for that. First one, the founder wanted that people should have the idea that Toyota & the Toyoda family are not related as the company is public. Second one reflects the superstitious side of the Japanese minds as eight strokes are required to write 'Toyota' in Japanese whereas 10 stokes are required for 'Toyoda'. And they believe that eight is a lucky number. Third reason is pretty simple as they think the word 'Toyota' sounds better than 'Toyoda'! After reaching the plant, we were shown few parts of the whole manufacturing process. And one of those processes, has 1000 robots & 1600 humans working in a synchronized manner. I was wondering about the precision of work those robots were performing! It is just unbelievable. Anyway, soon we left the plant & got back to the square one. Another batch was waiting there. We had a small snacks at the Starbucks Coffee then. After few rounds of photo sessions, we started for Nagoya. After the trip to the Toyota production plant, I had found the answer to the question of WHY. It was a very good experience for me that day.

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