Toyota is celebrating 60 years of operations in Australia after beginning with the first official imports of LandCruisers into the country by Thiess Holdings.
In 1959, Thiess Toyota, a newly created subsidiary of the construction company, became the official Queensland distributor for the automaker’s commercial vehicles.
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Toyota history in Australia began in 1958, after Thiess became the first Australian company to win a construction contract on the huge Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme.
The company’s owner, Leslie Thiess – who was later knighted – had privately imported about a dozen LandCruisers to use on the site.He was so impressed with the vehicle’s capability in the harshest terrain, that he applied to Toyota in Japan to become an official distributor.
Toyota Australia sales and marketing chief Sean Hanley said the LandCruisers’ tough, durable capability set the scene for its ongoing role in helping Australia grow and thrive.
“Those very first LandCruisers proved their mettle in some very extreme conditions and while they did have some mechanical issues, Toyota supported Thiess with parts and even sent two Japanese engineers to be on site in the Snowy Mountains,” Hanley said.
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By GlobalData“It was the rugged nature of the vehicles and the company’s strong support that first established the brand here and word quickly spread, particularly in regional areas.”
Following its appointment as Queensland distributor, Thiess Toyota moved quickly to establish dealerships to service its growing customer base with one of the first being Rockhampton Car Sales, owned by George Jamieson.
A Thiess sales rep had taken a new LandCruiser to display at the Rockhampton Agricultural Show and asked Jamieson to put it on his stand, which he did – and promptly sold it to a local farmer on the same day.
Rockhampton Car Sales was one of 12 dealerships established in Queensland in 1959 that combined, sold a total of 69 LandCruisers that year. Last year, Toyota sold its one millionth LandCruiser in Australia with the global tally recently topping 10m.
Australia was the first country to build Toyota cars outside Japan after contract assembler Australian Motor Industries (AMI) secured the local franchise and began Tiara build from CKD kits at its factory in Melbourne in 1963. The company and its plant were eventually taken over by Toyota Motor Corporation as part of Toyota Australia.
Coincidentally, Toyota also started in Brazil with the LandCruiser. Its official UK blog notes its first big export orders came from South America in the early 1950s and it soon realised that Brazil had big potential. It opened an office in Sao Paulo in 1958 and started supplying Land Cruisers – the tough vehicles considered ideal for the local environment.
A year later the government decreed vehicles had to have local content so it set up a factory assembling the Bandeirante – the Brazilian name for the Land Cruiser.
By 1962 the business had grown to the point where Toyota do Brasil was able to open “the first full Toyota production plant” outside Japan, at Sao Bernardo do Campo.
