Volkswagen had been in the lead for the first half of the year. Toyota’s groupwide sales, including Daihatsu Motor and Hino Motors, decreased 1.5% on the year to 7,498,000 vehicles. Interestingly, the numbers are strikingly similar to a year ago. “Toyota will be the No. 1 for this year”, comments Koji Endo, an auto analyst at Advanced Research Japan. The American automaker sold about 7.2 million. The sales figures indicate a drop of 1 percent as compared to the same time period in 2014. This should definitely cause a dent in the company’s sales, and make it harder for VW to fulfill former CEO Martin Winterkorn’s objective of becoming world’s largest automaker by 2018. That means the most recent sales figures include less than two weeks when buyers would have been aware of Volkswagen’s behaviour.
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About a fifth of the company’s market value has been wiped out since the scandal broke.
Automakers are being challenged by softening conditions in markets such as China and Russian Federation, but Volkswagen has another problem altogether: the group has been forced to stop selling diesel models in a few markets after it was caught cheating emissions tests. Its sales may suffer because of a scandal, which hit last month, in which its cars were found equipped with software that allowed them to cheat USA emissions tests. However, the scandal is bound to have a considerable impact in the final quarter of the year. GM was the world’s biggest automaker through most of its history until surpassed by Toyota in 2008.
Toyota first overtook GM to take the top slot in 2008 and has kept it every year since, except 2011 when GM was the top seller after a tsunami in north-eastern Japan disrupted Toyota’s production.
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Toyota recaptures title of top global automaker, outpacing Volkswagen and General Motors.
