Being the fastest rising star in the industry, Toyota is going to overtake Ford to be the world's second largest car maker in 2005. Now GM is also within reach. Toyota is going stronger and stronger in recent years. At home, its cars engaged 6 of the top 10 places at domestic sales chart in 2004. Its local sales is nearly twice the number of the second place Nissan.

At North America, it is growing quickly and is going to overtake Chrysler soon. Camry has been the region's best selling cars for years, while Lexus is the best selling premium brand.

At Europe, Toyota is gaining momentum like no others. Its French-made Yaris broke into the traditionally closed market and even won European's top award. Now the Czech-built Aygo is going to repeat the success.

Toyota's success is partly due to its care to build quality and service. For many years it used to make boring cars, but people still bought a lot of Toyotas because they had confidence in their quality, reliability and aftersales services. In recent years, Toyota started tactling it weaknesses one by one. Dull-looking cars are replaced by stylish ones (Yaris, bB, Caldina, Celica and new Lexus IS); Dull-driving cars are injected with good dynamics (Altezza), conservative replaced by innovation (Prius). Besides, it also started integrating the excessive platforms in Japan to reduce cost. The process is still on going, so in the foreseeable future Toyota will only get stronger.