If you are or have met many motorheads at Toyota dealers in Orange County, you will know the general conversation you generally have about your first car. There is usually a sense of nostalgia and desire to own the car that was your first and probably only true love back again at arm’s length.
Toyota of Orange, the number one Toyota dealer in Orange County believes that there is nothing wrong with lusting over your first car. What is wrong is being a massive car manufacturer whose earliest models are essentially lost to history.
Many car companies have a meticulous record of every vehicle they manufactured from their humble beginnings, but Toyota’s earliest days are greatly unknown, and the reason for that is because very little of its previous models remain.
How Did Toyota Begin?
Toyota’s beginnings are a lot different from its competitors. The company started to build looms for textiles, but with the permission of company founder Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kilchiro Toyoda started to take the company into car manufacturing in the 1930s.
Toyota of Orange, one of the leading Toyota dealers in Orange County says that the first prototypes debuted in 1935, which was called the A1. It had a straight-six that was a copy of a Chevy engine, the chassis, and the electrical system was cribbed from Ford, and its aerodynamic body was based on the DeSoto Airflow.
Once the first three prototypes were finished, Kilchiro had them blessed in a Buddhist ceremony then drove them to his father’s grave to honor him.
In 1936, the A1 went into production as the Toyoda AA, and one year afterward, the Toyota Motor Company was officially established.
How Was Toyota Initial Production?
In the beginning, Toyota built 1,404 AA sedans and 353 AB convertibles between 1936 and 1943. However, these are believed to be lost during World War II.
As you can imagine, the war wasn’t sympathetic to the home islands, and while Japan ran out of natural resources, the Toyota dealers in Orange County believe that there is a good probability the majority of A1s, AAs, and ABs were melted down and repurposed for planes, guns, or for piston rings.
Indications of Toyota’s earliest days became so sparse that in 1987 for Toyota’s 50th anniversary that the car company had to put out an announcement to locate an AA for the company’s museum.
Unfortunately, they could not find any, so it was decided it would be best to build a replica. Nevertheless, since there are no complete plans for the car to have survived the war, the car on display is just a close guesstimate of the AA.
It was probably the closest the company would ever get to its origins, until two decades later when news came of an unexpected barn find in Russia.
What Did They Find In The Russian Barn?
The world’s only surviving 1936 Toyoda AA was found in a barn in Vladivostok, which is a remote port city on the Pacific near Russia’s borders with China and North Korea. It is linked to European Russia by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which could be how the vehicle ended up just outside the city.
Still, it does not explain how the car got to Russia in the first place, since the Soviet Union had no presence on Japan’s home islands, and the country wasn’t exporting a lot right after the impact of World War II. Nevertheless, by some means, the car arrived in the Soviet Union, to Siberia to be exact, and it spent decades as a farm car.
In 2008, a 25-year-old Russian student contacted the Louwman Museum in the Netherlands with some information that sounded just too good to be true. He saw a classified ad in his local paper for a 1936 Airflow but when he checked out the car, he became convinced that it was an AA.
The Louwman Museum is one of the oldest and most esteemed auto museums in the world, so grabbing the oldest Toyota in existence would be an extraordinary achievement.
What Is The Car’s History?
After doing some research, it turns out the car was imported sometime in the 1940s and was surprisingly owned by the same family for over 60 years. Years of Siberian winters, a lack of parts, and hard work were not too good for the AA, and also it had been modified a lot over the years.
At some point, it was adapted from right to left-hand drive, a radio was installed, newer windshield wipers were fitted, a replacement grille was assembled together, and it was lifted on Soviet-era truck wheels, making it look very similar to a ’30s-era take on the Toyota Venza.
But above all, it was an AA, and probably the only one left in the world.
What Happened To The Oldest Toyota In The World?
When the Louwman Museum got involved, the Russian government took an interest in the car. Since the car was over 50 years old, the AA fell under the jurisdiction of the Russian Ministry of Culture, which made the sale very difficult. After seven months of negotiations between the museum, the seller, and the government, the AA was exported to the Hague, where it sits in the museum with its 80 years of battle scars.
If you are an avid follower of the collector car market, you will know that barn finds and preservation class cars are the most rendest thing at the moment.
However, for each car that gets rediscovered in an abandoned garage, they feel not as special as this Toyota does. That is because many vehicles that are rediscovered today are high-end luxury vehicles or sports cars, and they usually have a registry somewhere, or high-end collectors have been circling for years, waiting for the present owner to let go and sell, or even to pass away.
Although there are some rare muscle cars out there, mass production means that there are just a few lone survivors out there. The Russian AA was truly a unicorn find; it was unexpected and believe to be impossible.
Toyota has been in the car manufacturing business for nearly 90 years and has built a strong reputation for building strong, and reliable cars, but now it is also known as having the ultimate barn find!