Four months into the year, the Top 3 ranking of world’s largest automakers remains unchanged, as it probably will be for the rest of the year.
Top-ranked Toyota Group has put the scandal-induced stoppages of last year behind, and delivered a solid 8.6% increase over last year’s Jan-April global sales. That came mostly on the back of resurging domestic sales, up 35.3% over last year’s Jan-April Japan sales, which were hit hardest by production stops. Toyota Group booked a record April on a global sales basis. Toyota reluctantly sells BEVs where they are demanded (usually by governments). Jan-April, Toyota sold 50,998 BEVs outside of Japan. At home in Japan, Toyota sold 293 of the battery-operated vehicles.
Volkswagen Group is playing its sales data close to their chests and reports only on a quarterly basis.
Hyundai Group, up 1.1% Jan-April, is scooting along. Hyundai brand sales were flat, global Kia sales were up 2.5%.
Caveat: All sales data as reported by the respective automaker. Note that “sales” can be an elastic term, some OEMs report hard registrations, some “sales to wholesale,” which can mean cars placed on dealer lots, or transferred to the OEM’s sales organization. Methods may differ from region to region. Some report “deliveries,” which can be nothing more than cars moved out of the factory door, some report hard registrations tabulated by government entities. Even those numbers can be skewed by “self-registrations” performed by dealers and OEMs alike.
