Yamaha celebrates its 65th year on 1 July 2020, a date that we call Yamaha Day. We’re celebrating by focusing on our heritage and we encourage you to join us to help mark this milestone.

Yamaha started creating exceptional value and experiences that enrichen the lives of our customers when the first motorcycle rolled out of our factory in 1955. We’ve been realising peoples' dreams with ingenuity and passion ever since. We call it Kando. And if it doesn’t produce Kando, then it’s not a Yamaha.

Since those early years, Yamaha has remained keenly aware of our customer’s needs. So it wasn’t long before we diversified from motorcycle production. This was driven by company founder Genichi Kawakami’s desire to succeed - and discovered when out on the water. The motor that powered his boat was made in the US, but it often broke down. He tried replacing it with Japanese products, but they proved substantially inferior to the foreign motor in terms of both quality and performance. This experience turned his attention toward the development of outboard motors - and the first model P7 of 1960. 

With a mandate to produce products that move you emotionally and not just physically Yamaha introduced the Land Car in 1974 - a vehicle designed to travel short distances at places like theme parks. This formed the basis of our first golf car.  

Yamaha soon turned its focus to developing a new type of personal watercraft that would be safer, more fun, and more mobile - and so the tandem model WaveRunner, was born in 1986. A single-rider model, the WaveJammer, appeared in January 1987 and each model created a segment that had not existed before.

1985 saw the first Yamaha four-wheel ATV and the following year the first remote controlled helicopter was completed in for crop dusting.

All the categories mentioned have remained a firm focus here in Australia and New Zealand – territories particularly well suited to Yamaha’s diverse product range. And these are just the tip of the iceberg as Yamaha heads into the next 65 years with the aim of not only expanding the concept of personal mobility but exploring the art of human possibilities.