Archives for January 2022

I have predicted for months that Toyota would end the year as World’s Largest Automaker, and unsurprisingly, largest automaker in the world 2021 is Toyota. Watching TMC out-distancing 2^nd ranked Volkswagen Group month after month, it was an easy call. Now, Toyota’s leadership is official. Third on the list of global car sales by manufacturer is the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance.

In 2021, the race for world’s largest car manufacturer wasn’t determined by how many an automaker could sell, but by how many cars an automaker could produce. Suddenly, the whole industry was “production constrained” as COVID-related supply chain problems brought down assembly lines all over the world. OEMs were especially hard hit by a shortage of electronic parts. Toyota, usually a master of the just-in-time universe, seems to have managed the chip crisis best by keeping large stockpiles of silicon, a lesson it had learned after the 2011 tsunami wiped out a strategic fab of major chipmaker Renesas. Despite typhoon-sized headwinds, Toyota managed to grow its global sales by a whopping 10.1 percent over 2020 – which is the one and only true surprise in this story.

At Toyota’s German peer Volkswagen, we are looking at a totally different picture. VW finished the year down 4.5% compared to an already low 2020. Its largest market China was down 14.1%. Its bread & butter Volkswagen passenger car brand was down 8.1%. The big shrinkage can’t possibly all have been caused by COVID. Volkswagen made a big switch to BEVs last year, and Volkswagen has a tendency of forgetting to market the bulk of its portfolio when management attention suddenly is focused on something new and unfamiliar. Volkswagen Group can pride itself of having increased its BEV sales by 95.5% last year to 452,900 units, small consolation for the fact that overall Group sales were down 423,000 units. [ There is more … ]