4 Classic cars from Akio Toyoda's personal collection

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Akio Toyota has been highly influential at Toyota over the past few years. The former CEO and current chairman brought performance and fun back to the Toyota line-up, and today, the company sells multiple GR – “Gazoo Racing” – models with sporty dynamics and manual transmissions.

When your name is on the door, you can do a lot! In addition to shepherding in a new era of performance and fun at Toyota, he managed to collect a few classic cars for himself. According to him, owning these four cars is the culmination of a childhood dream. Only one of the selections on this list is a Toyota, but all of them remind him of his childhood growing up in Japan.

1967 Subaru 360

The Subaru 360 was introduced in 1958, and it was one of the very first kei cars. Kei cars are a class of small cars in Japan that are built to strict displacement and dimensional limits. Their smaller size makes them easier to park, and more economical to drive.

But the limited size and displacement meant engineers had to be quite creative and efficient with their designs! Back then, kei cars were limited to just 360 cubic centimetres of displacement. The 360 was Subaru’s first car, and it was even offered for sale in the U.S., imported by none other than Malcolm Bricklin.

1960 Mazda R360

The R360 was Mazda’s very first car. Well, kinda. Technically it’s the company’s first four-wheeled car, because Mazda had been making three-wheeled utility trucks since 1931. And though it was Mazda’s first car, its breakthrough album, so to speak, wouldn’t arrive until a few years later.

Like Akio’s Subaru 360, the R360 is also a kei car. That means it has a 356-cc air-cooled V-twin engine back there, making about 16 horsepower. It’s certainly slower than any of the Toyota GR models! This cute car is an important chapter in Mazda’s history.

1962 Daihatsu Midget

And speaking of three-wheeled utility trucks, we have the cutest one of them all: the Daihatsu Midget. These little trucks used to be quite popular in Japan, and I imagine they were quite useful. All of these cars were ones that young Akio remembered seeing around Japan in his childhood. Although these were road-legal, Boeing and Lockheed bought a few to use inside their factories.

From 1959 to 1972, Daihatsu ended up producing some 336,000 units! This trucklet was also featured (and drive-able) in the 2004 video game Gran Turismo 4, where it’s coincidentally one of the slowest cars in the game.

1966 Toyota Corolla 1100

The only Toyota in Akio Toyoda’s classic collection is this 1966 Corolla 1100. This first generation of Corolla is fairly unremarkable, mechanically speaking, but it was a landmark car for Toyota, and a model the company still builds and sells today.

One interesting thing about this “E10”-generation Corolla was that it was originally intended to use a one-liter engine. That changed when the Datsun 1000 (as in “1000 cc”) came out, and Toyota hastily made the engine some 100 cc larger, simply to have one that was bigger than its competitors. Contemporary ads bragged about the “100-cc advantage” of the 1100-cc engine.

Akio Toyoda is a man of considerable means who could acquire any car he desires. I find it very interesting that considering his wealth and access, his personal collection of classics are all humble cars. There’s no million-dollar Toyota 2000GT or Nissan GT-R. He simply wanted to collect the cars he grew up seeing in his youth, like many of us do. Do you have a favourite from the collection?

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