Torrance, California, United States

🇺🇸 Torrance is a coastal city in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, California, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The city has 1.5 miles of beaches on the Pacific Ocean and a moderate year-round climate, with warm temperatures, daily sea breezes, low humidity, and an average rainfall of 12.55 inches per year. It is bordered by Lomita to the east, Gardena and Lawndale to the north, Redondo Beach, and the Pacific Ocean to the west, and Rolling Hills and Palos Verdes Estates to the south.

Torrance was incorporated in 1921. The city has 30 parks. The city consistently ranks among the safest cities in Los Angeles County. Torrance is the birthplace of the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO). It also has the second-highest percentage of residents of Japanese ancestry in California (8.9%), after the neighbouring city of Gardena.

Economy Torrance is home to the U.S. headquarters of Japanese automaker American Honda Motor Company. Robinson Helicopters are designed and built in Torrance as are Honeywell's Garrett turbochargers, used on automobile engines worldwide. Alcoa Fastening Systems (now known as Arconic) is headquartered in Torrance, producing aerospace fasteners. Pacific Sales, Pelican Products, Virco, and Rapiscan Systems are among the other companies based in Torrance.

According to a recent Financial Report, the city's top employers include: 1 Torrance Memorial Health System; 2 Torrance Unified School District; 3 Providence Little Co of Mary Medical Center; 4 City of Torrance; 5 Yoshinoya America Inc.; 6 American Honda Motor Co Inc.; 7 Robinson Helicopter Company; 8 Honeywell Aerospace; 9 Moog Aircraft Group; 10 Walmart.

The Del Amo Fashion Center, at 2.5 million square feet (232,000 m²), is one of the five largest malls in the United States by gross leasable area. The current mall was created when Del Amo Center, built in 1958, merged with Del Amo Fashion Square, built in 1972. Once located on opposite sides of Carson Street, a gigantic expansion of the mall spanning Carson Street joined the two centres by 1982, making it the largest mall in the world at the time. In 2005, the east end of the original mall north of Carson Street was demolished to make way for a new open-air shopping centre, opened in mid-September, 2006. This was followed in 2015 by the opening of an expanded northern Fashion Wing, with Nordstrom as the mall anchor and supplemented by luxury retailers such as Kate Spade, Hugo Boss, Uniqlo, Michael Kors, and Ben Bridge. The Old Towne Mall was an entertainment-themed mall operating in the 1970s.

As a major oil-producing region, Torrance was once dotted with thousands of oil wells and oil derricks. Though the oil wells are not as common as they once were, the Torrance Refinery Oil refinery owned by PBF Energy in the north end of the city is responsible for much of Southern California's gasoline supply. Torrance was also an important hub and shop site of the Pacific Electric Railway.

Torrance has a general aviation airport, originally named simply "Torrance Airport" and since renamed Zamperini Field after local track star, World War II hero and Torrance High graduate Louis Zamperini. The airport handles approximately 175,000 annual take-offs and landings (473 per day), down from the 1974 record of 428,000 operations. Airport noise abatement is a major local issue. In 2007 the Western Museum of Flight moved to Zamperini Field.

Torrance is also home to the main bakery facility for King's Hawaiian, the dominant brand of Hawaiian bread in North America. Younger Optics, Torrance's 10th-largest employer, created the first seamless or "invisible" bifocal.

The headquarters of Mitsuwa Marketplace and Nijiya Market are located in Torrance.

Operations of foreign companies All Nippon Airways operates its United States headquarters, a customer relations and services office, in Torrance.

The Toyota Motor Company of Japan established a U.S. headquarters on October 31, 1957, at a former Rambler dealership in Hollywood. Toyota sold 287 Toyopet Crowns and one Land Cruiser during the company's first year of U.S. operation. It moved Toyota Motor Sales USA operations to Torrance in 1982, because of easy access to port facilities and the LAX airport. In 2013, it sold 2.2 million vehicles in the U.S. In 2014, it announced it would move 3,000 of its white-collar employees to Plano, Texas, near Dallas, to be closer to its American factories. Numerous other Japanese firms followed Toyota to Los Angeles, because of its location and its reputation as the national trend-setter.

The Los Angeles South Bay area, as of 2014, has the largest concentration of Japanese companies in the United States.