In Japanese culture, a 60th birthday is called kanreki, and it represents not just a celebration of the passage of time but a potential for rebirth. The custom hails from China, adopted during the eighth century, and is based on the Chinese zodiac calendar. When you reach 60, you've been through the entire cycle five times and are back at your birth sign. What's passed? What's next? These are the questions that Toyota Canada has to ask itself at the end of a long pan-Canadian celebratory drive.
Driving across Canada from St. John's, Nfld., to Victoria, B.C., in a Toyota is both an adventure and yet also not really an adventure. Thousands of Canadians have done so over the years, and you have to think none of them would have been surprised to reach their aimed-for destination. It's a large part of why you buy a Toyota in the first place: leave A, arrive at B, with no need to stop at C, D, E, or, saints preserve us, F.
Of course, there's more to Toyota's story in Canada. Last year, the RAV4 was the best-selling passenger vehicle in Canada (excluding pickup trucks), and at the same time, the Corolla beat out the Honda Civic for best-selling Canadian car. Canadians drive a lot of Toyotas. Canadians build a lot of Toyotas. Canadian Toyota dealerships employ hundreds, if not thousands, of technicians and sales staff. Canadian Toyota enthusiast clubs are involved in everything from off-road excursions to track days and late-night meets.
The arrival of Toyota forever changed the face of the automotive industry in this country, and its future will continue to influence what we see on our roads. There's plenty to be enthusiastic about on the horizon, but as Toyota celebrates its kanreki, let's look at how we got from there to here, standing at Mile Zero in Victoria, with bemused tourists filtering past on the scenic coastal road.
This Land is your Land (Cruiser)
Toyota first arrived in Canada in 1964 by way of a distributorship deal with Canadian Motor Industries (CMI), after a curious footnote of automotive history that included Studebaker and Richard Nixon. The first few hundred cars sold in Canada were the fairly conventional Crown sedan, the adorable but snail-paced 700 UP10 (called the Publica in Japan), and the Land Cruiser.
Of all Toyota nameplates, nothing can really hold a candle to the reputation of the Land Cruiser badge, not even the Supra. These first 1960s Land Cruisers were rugged little mountain goats and have become valuable collector items in modern times.
No Toyota collection would be complete without a vintage Land Cruiser, and its appeal and charm are immediately apparent. As agricultural and capable as a Land Rover of similar age, they are unaffected by the British Leyland Leprosy that causes old Rovers to occasionally strand their owners. Still, you probably wouldn't want to drive an original Land Cruiser across Canada unless you wanted your spine pulverized into a fine mist.
For most Canadians, the Land Cruiser brand appeared absent from the market for decades until the just-launched current model, but this is not quite true. Along with a trickle of U.S. and Japanese market imports, Land Cruisers have been coming into Canada steadily without pause, even since the official discontinuation in 1989. It's just that you haven't seen them because they're underground.
Almost universally, Canadian mining outfits employ Land Cruisers as working vehicles in mines that dig up everything from copper to gold. Imported for off-road duty, brand-new older 70-Series Land Cruisers are shipped to companies like Miller Technology in North Bay, Ont., and outfitted for a lifetime spent navigating the inky blackness below. These are simple vehicles mostly using an outdated 4.2L inline-six that wouldn't pass modern on-road emissions tests but is as durable as an iron pry bar. Talk to mine operators, and they'll tell you a Land Cruiser is the only machine that's tough enough to survive in these gruelling conditions.
With the modern version, you get the best of both worlds. The current Land Cruiser is not particularly more wearying when racking up highway miles than a crossover like a Highlander would be, yet it is still supremely capable off-road. Along with the 4Runner, Tacoma, and Tundra, Toyota's off-road-oriented products have long allowed Canadians to get out and explore the parts of their country that are full of bears and Samsquanches.
Performance for the People
Toyota's first thrifty compact, the aforementioned 700 UP10, was an oddball. It had a charming face as if designed by Richard Scarry, but the powertrain was slightly unconventional: it had a two-cylinder boxer engine displacing a scant 700 ccs, was rear-wheel drive, and had an available two-speed automatic transmission. Basically, the UP10 was Toyota's take on a Citroën 2CV, just with rear-wheel drive.
Like many very early Japanese cars, it wasn't a hit but did establish a beachhead for what would follow. By the early 1970s, the compact Corolla had arrived in hundreds of Canadian driveways, simple, conventional, cheap to fuel, and reliable.
Fast forward to today, and the average person's view of the Corolla is akin to that of a toaster or dishwasher. The ubiquitous beige Corolla of the 1990s and 2000s was the definitive automotive appliance, the hand-me-down car that did the job in an unexciting but dependable way.
Except the Corolla was and continues to be much more exciting than anyone gives it credit for. Obviously, the GR Corolla today embodies that rally-car-for-the-road ethos better than even the Subaru WRX, but there's plenty of previous examples if you know where to look. And, in fact, it was a Toyota Corolla that gave Canada its only World Rally Championship win.
In 1973, at Michigan's Press On Regardless rally, the driver and co-driver team of Walter Boyce and Doug Woods beat a huge field of other entrants in a privateer Corolla 1600. Rivals included the factory-backed Alpine A110 that had just won the Sanremo rally, Datsun 510s, Ford Escort RS1600s, and all manner of other rally legends. But in the end, it was a couple of Canucks in a Corolla that handed Toyota its very first WRC win.
Corollas would also race on-track in several Canadian series, and there would be the odd special variant like the GT-S hatchback of the 1980s or the Celica-engined XRS in the 1990s. A cardinal rule of racing is that to finish first, you must first finish, so perhaps it's not a surprise that a reliable compact Toyota turned out to be a great base for building a winning racing machine.
Further, when it comes to the enthusiast market, Toyota deserves plenty of credit for keeping affordable performance around. The Supra is, of course, the brand's flagship model, but the GR86 is still the Mazda MX-5's only creditable rival for small, rear-wheel-drive sports cars (along with the closely related Subaru BRZ). The GR86's ancestors (Scion FRS, GT86, etc.) continue to be a go-to in the used market for young enthusiasts looking to get into something more exciting than that hand-me-down beige automatic Corolla.
Unthinking Technology
It is a universal truth that there are far more driving “unenthusiasts” than gearheads in the world. For most folks, driving is a chore, outside of perhaps an annual family road trip or weekend excursion. Driving hits your wallet for insurance, fuel, and maintenance, and you'd probably like to spend less money on all three.
At least for the latter two, Toyota created a game-changer. The Prius was first a weird science project, then a boring commuter, and now something that is both surprisingly excellent to drive and features some pretty attractive styling. But even if the current Prius took a huge leap forward in appeal, it's the middle part of the Prius story that is the meat of the sandwich. One of the greatest successes of Toyota's engineers was creating an advanced technology that you never need to actually think about.
Remember that best-selling RAV4? More than half of the nearly 75,000 crossovers sold last year were hybrids or plug-in hybrids. The new Camry? Every single one is now a hybrid. The Land Cruisers and Tacomas out there exploring Canadian forest service roads? The first is a standard hybrid, while the second is available as a hybrid.
Especially in something like the Corolla Hybrid, the best part is that you do not need to understand what's going on under the hood of your car, only that an electrified system is working hard to save fuel. There is no learning curve, no need for apps, and no lifestyle change required. Even more importantly, perhaps, Toyota's hybrid systems are so well established for reliability that resale is just as good as conventional powertrains, maybe even better. A hybridized Toyota is not as headline-generating as bold EV predictions, but it just works.
Built in Canada, Sold in Canada
About 25 years after Toyota's first arrival as an import brand in Canada, Canadian-built Corollas started rolling off the line in Cambridge, Ont. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (TMMC) now builds the Lexus RX and NX crossovers, as well as the best-selling RAV4.
The manufacturing capacity of TMMC's Ontario factories is immense, with the ability to produce 500,000 vehicles annually. It currently makes some 1,400 RAV4s per day, or about 350,000 of them annually. It says something about the RAV4's popularity that wait times are measured in months despite the high factory output. TMMC is Canada's largest automotive producer and employs more than 8,000 people. It just built its 11 millionth car, which was a RAV4, of course.
Add in just shy of 300 Toyota and Lexus dealerships across Canada, and you have many thousands of families for whom Toyota puts food on the table. About a third of all Toyota dealerships are in Ontario, most of those in southern Ontario, which means that choosing to buy a RAV4 is basically shopping locally. Add in the various charitable works that many dealerships and Toyota itself are involved in, and 60 years of the automaker’s growth in Canada has been good for the country itself.
Beyond Mile Zero
As a blend between caution and occasional forward-thinking risk-taking, Toyota Canada's story is a roadmap to its present success. The tricky part is that, like paper roadmaps themselves, the straightforward approach is a bit of a lost art these days. Many startup automakers seem to succeed more in the promising than in the delivering.
Such an approach probably won't work for Toyota. The company's biggest current problem is just finding a way to get its products to waiting customers before they go explore other options. Customer loyalty goes a long way, but no one likes to wait.
Hydrogen power, which Toyota continues to invest in, remains something of a moonshot. There's a new filling station in Kelowna, B.C., and a pilot project with 100 Mirai fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) at Edmonton International Airport in Burnaby. It still feels experimental, but Toyota is one of the few automakers trying things out in this sphere.
Electrification is, of course, the big push for most of the industry, and critics have said that Toyota is slow to pivot. Its slow and sensible approach, heavy on hybrid tech, does make a great deal of sense, but Toyota is late to the party. If so, there's such a thing as being fashionably late. Honda beat Toyota by a year with the first-generation Insight, the first production hybrid car in North America. The Prius didn't have to be the first; it just had to be the one that worked.
For Toyota, this next decade will seem to move faster than the previous six, something that will be all too familiar to the other 60-year-olds out there. Success, if it comes, will rely on recapturing the company's youthful energy rather than looking back complacently. Toyota Canada's celebratory cross-Canada trip ends at Mile Zero. Its journey is just about to get interesting.