How The Toyota Tacoma Grew From Japanese Oddity To All American - Yahoo Autos (blog)
It’s likely that in every country on Earth there’s a Toyota truck working brutally hard at this very moment. While its known for cars, Toyota started building trucks just three months after it launched into carbuilding. They’ve had to endure abusive lives working in agriculture, commerce and every grimy service industry there is. Atop that, there are the Toyota trucks that have been swept up by militias, had. Beyond those beastly burdens, Toyota’s compact trucks – the Tacoma and all its ancestors – have become a rite of passage here in America. A Toyota small truck is what Marty McFly came Back to the Future to find in his garage. Toyota compact pickups are often the first taste of truck ownership Americans get. There was nothing glamorous about Toyota’s first truck, the 1935 G1 – even if it wasn’t ugly. It used the same 62-horsepower, 3. 4-liter six-cylinder engine as the A1 But more importantly, the 379 that Toyoda produced were enough to get the company certified as a vehicle manufacturer under Japan’s Automotive Manufacturing Industries law. By the time it was replaced by the GA truck in 1936, Toyoda had changed the name of the company to Toyota. So Toyota produced the 1947 Toyopet Model SB, a small pickup that started the line of trucks that leads directly to today’s Tacoma compact pickup. Source: www.yahoo.com
