Do we like Toyota?
World's top-selling carmaker (Toyota, Lexus, Daihatsu, Hino), based in Toyota City, Japan
Our score: 4 out of 10. Mixed, leaning cautious. We'd hesitate: repeated safety-test and emissions scandals in the group, plus heavy lobbying against climate rules, outweigh what we could verify as good.
Toyota is the world's top-selling carmaker. It was founded in 1937 by Kiichiro Toyoda, and the founder's grandson Akio Toyoda is still chairman. In April 2026 CFO Kenta Kon became CEO. Bloomberg called him a lieutenant of Toyoda and said the move tightens Toyoda's control.
The big dramas are about honesty. In 2014 the US Justice Department fined Toyota $1.2bn and said it had misled the public and regulators over sudden-acceleration problems. More recently Japan's transport ministry found Toyota and rivals had sent in flawed safety-test data. Toyota's Daihatsu unit admitted manipulating tests going back to 1989.
Toyota's truck unit Hino agreed to pay $1.6bn over emissions-testing fraud in the US, per a Justice Department statement. Toyota's US lending arm paid $60m after the CFPB said it made it hard for borrowers to cancel add-on products. Toyota Motor Credit settled without admitting or denying liability.
On climate, Toyota gets a lot of heat. Public Citizen cites InfluenceMap, which ranked it among the world's worst companies for anti-climate lobbying in 2022. In 2023 shareholders voted down a proposal for more transparency on its climate lobbying. Toyota says its multi-path approach to clean cars is more practical.
Bottom line: Toyota's founder-family control and a record takeover of Toyota Industries have drawn governance questions. Add the repeated trust-damaging scandals and the lobbying, and we land at a 4. It's a giant that has often fallen short on candour, and we found few clear good deeds.