Toyota years. It is currently the site of Tesla, Inc.'s assembly plant. Toyota then started to establish new brands at the end of the 1980s, with the launch of their luxury division Lexus in 1989. In the 1990s, Toyota began to branch out from producing mostly compact cars by adding many larger and more luxurious vehicles to its lineup, including a full-sized pickup, the T100 (and later the Tundra), several lines of SUVs, a sport version of the Camry, known as the Camry Solara. They would also launch newer iterations of their sports cars, namely the MR2, Celica, and Supra during
Toyota FJ Cruiser in 1984, Toyota had shifted towards increasing the size and luxury of the Land Cruiser line. The idea of a new FJ with rugged capabilities of the FJ40 originated in the mid 1990s with Toyota's product planner Dave Danzer and vice-president of sales and operations Yoshi Inaba. Danzer worked secretly with Akio Toyoda to set up a special shop at the NUMMI plant to test the feasibility of a new FJ40 by combining Tacoma underpinnings with the bodies of Toyota Bandeirantes, an FJ40-based vehicle still in production in Brazil (as a diesel model only) at the time. Toyoda returned to