The Toyota HiLux began life as a pickup built by truck maker Hino
Toyota's famously tough HiLux pickup has an unexpected ancestor: the Hino Briska, a small truck built by a struggling Japanese maker of buses and heavy lorries. After Hino became a Toyota affiliate in 1966, the Briska was rebadged as a Toyota and, in 1968, used to develop the HiLux.
Hino's roots lie in a gas-parts supplier founded in Tokyo in 1910. When its main customer lost out to a rival gas company and was absorbed in 1912, the firm branched into electrical parts, and in 1917 built its first motor vehicle, a truck. Hino Heavy Industry was spun off in 1942 and took its name from its headquarters city of Hino in Tokyo. After the war, treaty limits on large marine diesels led it to drop Heavy from its name and focus on trucks, buses and diesel engines.
It pushed Japanese trucking forward. Its TH10 of 1950 was an eight-tonner at a time when Japanese trucks rarely carried more than 6,000 kilograms, and in 1952 it introduced a forward-control cab, a first for a Japanese maker. It even made cars for a while, building Renaults under licence and then its own rear-engined Contessa sedan. In 1991 it released the world's first commercially available hybrid transit bus.
Money was a recurring problem. Financial trouble in the 1960s and government pressure to consolidate pushed Hino into partnership with Toyota, and it stopped assembling passenger cars in 1969. Its fuel-efficient diesels of the 1970s, which drew on MAN technology, drove exports past domestic sales by the end of that decade. When difficulties returned in the 1990s, Toyota handed it assembly contracts and steadily raised its shareholding, finally taking a majority in 2001.
Hino built partnerships well beyond Toyota, advising China's FAW on modernising trucks descended from a 1940s design, licensing engines to Ashok Leyland from 1986 and combining bus production with Isuzu in a joint venture. In 2026 Hino merged with Fuso under a new holding company named Archion.
Source: Hino Motors
