Along the way we have kept pace with customers’ evolving tastes and requirements, increasing our research and design resources here to be sure we produce the kind of cars Europeans want to drive. And we have constantly strived to do things better: offering ever better cars, better reliability and better service.
We have invested more than €9 billion locally in building factories to make our cars, engines and transmissions, to establish technical centres and a thriving design studio and to help our suppliers develop to manufacture the thousands of parts that go into every vehicle. This has created thousands of jobs, not just for our business, but for our network of more than 400 European supplier businesses as well. Having these facilities within Europe means we can offer our customers shorter delivery times and reduce the impact on the environment of our shipping operations.
We recognise that European customers are some of the most discerning in the world and we have used their expectations as a benchmark for designing cars we can be sure meet the highest standards of performance, design and aesthetic appeal, models such as the ground-breaking new Toyota C-HR crossover.
We began researching how to make cars cleaner and more efficient long before it became a headline issue for the auto industry as a whole, investing in hybrid and fuel cell technology.
We have put around three million electric hybrids on Europe’s roads since launching Prius, our original hybrid, in Europe. And we don’t just sell our hybrids in Europe, we build them here, too - Corolla hybrids in the UK, Yaris hybrid models in France and the hybrid models of the Toyota C-HR and the Corolla Sedan in Turkey.
We have also made a number of European countries among the first to benefit from our pioneering hydrogen fuel cell technology, as featured in the Mirai, the world’s first mass-produced fuel cell sedan. Bringing Mirai to the market place is a critical step in breaking the “chicken and egg” question of which should come first – the vehicle or the infrastructure.
We support the co-ordinated efforts of car markers, energy providers, governments and public authorities to help develop national and European hydrogen power infrastructures that will support Mirai and other hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Building cleaner cars in Europe and for Europe is only one aspect of our work to protect and nurture the environment. The factories and offices we have built are world pioneers of new and effective ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, minimise emissions and work in harmony with natural world around us.