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Toyota Beat Volkswagen. And That’s That.

The auto industry has gotten in recent years so messed up nobody really knows what car they are actually buying. Since the economic crisis of the late 2000s, auto brands have disappeared, reappeared, have been been absorbed by other brands, auto groups have risen and fallen.
Toyota sold over 1 million cars more than Volkswagen in 2017 1 photo
Photo: mortgagecrusher.ca
Once, it was simple. When you bought a car, you knew what it was. As the word should go, if it looks like a BMW, if it acts like a BMW, then it must be a BMW. Or whatever other nameplate.

These days, not even auto companies, be it cars or parts manufacturers, don’t seem to know exactly what’s what. Take Takata for example, the company that prompted the biggest recall in automotive history (ongoing): they still don’t have any idea what cars or brands use their defective products.

Shared platforms-shared parts rhetoric aside, there is the problem of who is number one on the world scene, sales wise. Take the conflicting, bombastic statements made by several automaker at the beginning of the year.

Two of Germany’s finest, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, took to the media and stated they were both, in 2017, the world’s number one premium brand. Not together, but separately.

This happens because BMW is no longer just BMW. It has several other brands under its wings, Mottorad and BMW i, which it also included in the sales report. Compared brand-by-brand, only BMW agains only Mercedes-Benz cars, the three pointed star won by a landslide.

But the German quarrel is nothing compared to the one Volkswagen tries to pick with arch-rival Toyota. For years the people’s car brand has stated that it would overthrow the Japanese as the world leading auto maker, and for that to happen has engaged in a buying campaign like no other, targeted at numerous European brands.

Today, the Volkswagen Group is probably the biggest automotive company, in terms of size. It sells cars under the logos of twelve individual brands: Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini, Porsche, Scania and Man.

At the opposite end, Toyota is quite smaller by comparison. It owns Daihatsu, Lexus and Toyota and has some minor stakes in Subaru or Isuzu.

Excluding the Scania, Man and Ducati brands from the VW group, that would still mean the Germans beat the Japanese 9 to 3.

At one point, feeling the new target to beat is Volkswagen, Nissan also jumped in, saying it is number one when it comes to sales. Owning Nissan, Infiniti and Datsun, these other Japanese said they sold, together with partner in crime Renault, some 10.6 million cars last year. A bit over Volkswagen’s 10.53 million and well above Toyota’s 10.2 million.

Luckily, last week JATO Dynamics put things into perspective for us, as the data analysis company cares little about auto groups, and more about auto brands. And in the numbers they made public lies the truth.

The organization says in 2017 people all over the planet have bought 86.05 million cars. That’s a 2.4 percent increase over 2016. By cars, JATO means passenger and light commercial vehicles, not all that truck or overpriced supercar stuff Volkswagen has aplenty of.

Drawing data from auto sales in 52 world markets, the JATO analysis shows that, brand-over-brand, Toyota still rules the world. More precisely, there have been 7,843,423 new cars wearing the Toyota logo hitting the streets last year.

By comparison, Volkswagen is way-way back. It sold some 1.2 million cars less than Toyota, or 6,639,250. Nissan, the other automaker bragging to have overthrown Toyota, ranks fourth in the world, with 4,834,694 vehicles.

So, by all intents and purposes, that’s the way it is. We’re pretty sure that, as a group, Volkswagen has more money, more facilities, more employees, more plans for the future than Toyota. But, as a brand, is still behind the Japanese.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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