Through most of his life, Sakichi Toyoda was known not for his nearly eponymous automobile, but for a new type of automatic wooden loom, the rights to which Toyoda sold to the British company Platt Brothers for one million yen. Using that nest egg, and with the help of the Japanese government for national security reasons, Toyoda began researching gasoline engines that could be used on cars, founding an Automobile Department at the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works.

On this day, August 28, in 1937, Toyoda spun off his automobile company, creating the Toyota Motor Car Company. The changeover from D to T in the name came for reasons of euphony, as well as because the T in Japanese took eight strokes to write, a luckier number in Japanese culture.

Toyota started out making more commercial than private transportation vehicles. Up to 1943 they sold few cars but lot of buses and trucks. After the second world war, they moved into taxis, creating the enduring Toyopet model that would come to characterize Toyota cars as a whole: it wasn’t flashy or fast, but it was cheap and could handle the rough roads of postwar Japan.