RECAP: A digest of recent Toyota news

It may be small, but the much-anticipated new Toyota Aygo made a big impact when it broke cover at the Geneva motor show. It will be on sale in the UK this summer, but already it’s whetted the appetites of the media and public alike with its sharp new styling and highly customisable design, as these pictures show. We’ve also heard from the leading creatives behind the project, who explain how new Aygo will be a pathfinder for more excitingly styled Toyotas in the future.

While new Aygo is set to sell by the thousand, a more rarified Toyota has also broken cover with the official launch of the TS040 Hybrid, the car which will carry Toyota’s hopes at Le Mans this year. Two cars will be competing at the 24-hour race, and throughout this year’s FIA World Endurance Championship. As well as getting to grips with the formidable new race car, Toyota Racing driver Anthony Davidson has taken delivery of a hybrid road car too, a British-built Auris Touring Sports.

The TS040 Hybrid will be lining up with other great Toyota Le Mans cars at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. The event will also welcome many more memorable Toyota race and rally cars, with some equally famous drivers at the wheel.  Some great images of the Le Mans cars, pictured in Toyota Motorsport’s museum in Cologne, are now available for downloading and editorial use.

Caring for the environment and safeguarding natural resources are at the heart of Toyota’s global business, not just where the performance of its vehicles are concerned, but equally in using less energy and natural resources to make them and creating less waste. Toyota Manufacturing UK is a pathfinder for the company’s eco-manufacturing principles, while elsewhere in the world innovative ideas are being put into practice. Recent initiatives include using landfill gas as a power source for a factory and a Toyota-first technology for retrieving and recycling copper from end-of-life vehicles.

The new car sales figures for the first quarter of the year revealed the British-built Auris claiming its best market share yet, with hybrids accounting for half of all those sold.  Yaris is also on the rise, breaking into the UK’s top 10 seller, again with hybrid proving the dynamo for increased customer interest.

Did you know?

One in every four Toyotas sold in Britain is built in Britain. This and many other key statistics about our UK manufacturing achievements, market performance and growth of hybrid are presented in a fact-packed infographic that accompanies the news release about Auris’s booming sales.

Remember when?

Aygo has been a successful and colourful part of Toyota’s UK model range since 2005. It got off to a great start, lining up for a panel-banging five-a-side football match for Top Gear (Top Gear magazine went on to make Aygo its car of the year jointly with the Bugatti Veyron). If that wasn’t mad enough, we went on to create Aygo Crazy, a one-off, mid-engined special that’s now part of our classic collection.

Picture this

Visit the Images section of our media website, media.toyota.co.uk, for a comprehensive collection of current model shots, concepts and news pictures for easy download for editorial use. For film footage, click on the Videos tab to access the library, view and download material.

And there’s more…

You can find much more Toyota content at: –

Official UK media website

Official Toyota UK blog

Official Toyota UK Facebook page

Official Toyota GB Twitter @toyotagb

Official Toyota UK YouTube channel

Official Toyota UK Instagram