Pending an absence of falling skies, Dailykanban declares Toyota Group World’s Largest Automaker 2022. Yes, 2022. In the past, our predictions usually were pretty solid, but never did we dare to call a winner with only four months on the books. The distance between #1 Toyota Group and #2 Volkswagen Group simply is (for Volkswagen) too depressingly large, and the gap keeps on growing. Now here is the strange part: According to published media, battery electric vehicles are the key to hyper-growth in the auto industry. Yet, according to statistics on hand, a bet on BEVs does not appear to guarantee success. Toyota is (unfairly) branded as a battery-skeptic, yet it leads the market, supply chain problems and Chinese lockdowns be damned. Volkswagen bets the bank on BEVs, its CEO Diess wants to beat Tesla by 2025, but deliveries crater. Sure, BEVS (or HEVS) may have replaced the ICE in a few decades, but an OEM needs to remain alive before we get there. Toyota hasn’t lost sight of that simple fact. Volkswagen seemingly has.
To understand how badly Volkswagen is doing, let’s note that total global industry volume was down 11% in April, and 7% for the first four months of the year. Toyota outperformed the market with year-to-date sales down 5.8%, and April sales down 10.4%. Volkswagen Group, however, is down 26% for the year, and a very hard 37.8% in the month of April. If Volkswagen maintains its current trajectory, it could end the year with some 7 million units delivered, a far cry from the >10 million of years gone by. Meanwhile, Toyota plans for close to 10 million units for the current fiscal ending in March 2023, and its current trajectory leads into that direction. Declaring Toyota Group World’s Largest Automaker 2022 is a safe bet.
