Toyota’s fortune began with a loom that stopped when a thread broke.
Sakichi Toyoda built automatic looms before the family name was ever attached to cars. His loom company’s most famous feature was a mechanism that stopped automatically when a thread broke. In the 1930s the profits of that loom works paid for a car department, and it grew into a carmaker that now sells more than 11 million vehicles a year.
Toyota on Brandseum