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World September 2014: Volkswagen catches up on Toyota for #1

VW Lavida China March 2013. Picture courtesy of bitautoThe Volkswagen Group is getting closer to Toyota thanks to its strength in China.

Bloomberg News announced today that the Volkswagen Group, boosted by strong sales in China and despite a marked slowdown in the US, is catching up with market Toyota Motor Corp. for the much coveted annual global crown. Relating Bloomberg’s calculations, Automotive News said VW Group’s deliveries through September, including the Porsche and Audi luxury divisions and MAN and Scania heavy-truck units, trailed Toyota’s by 72,000 vehicles compared with 227,000 a year earlier. Both Toyota and VW plan in excess of 10 million deliveries in 2014, and for now VW is up 5% year-on-year over the first 9 months of 2014 to 7.54 million cars and trucks vs. 7.62 million vehicles (+2.8%) for Toyota, including the Daihatsu minicar and Hino truck brands. The difference is roughly equivalent to the 72,499 light trucks that Toyota sold in the U.S. last month. VW doesn’t sell trucks there. In third place, General Motors gets distanced with a 2% increase to 7.37 million vehicles.

This Post Has 11 Comments
  1. Bryan :
    Volkswagen can surpass Toyota in terms of number of sales, but they aren’t even close to the much better reliability of Toyota.

    Curious how you gonna prove this. Best reliability in the world would mean reaching best ranks in EVERY reliability ranking worldwide in EVERY country with EVERY single model. Now you show us please that Toyota is ahead :p

  2. VW even without any existence in South East Asia, where Toyota is the king… imagine when VW enter this market and start crawling the sales… those 70k gap will just gone in few months.

  3. Volkswagen can surpass Toyota in terms of number of sales, but they aren’t even close to the much better reliability of Toyota.

    VW should concentrate in making better cars instead of this sick obsession of being the biggest car manufacturer.

  4. Actually Toyota lead more after 3/4 than after 1/2 of this year, so they outsold VW group in this 3rd quarter, if i remember numbers were 5.1m vs 5.07m for Toyota after 1st half, anyway i expected all 3 automakers to get over 10million this year, and that distance between them will be very low – not more than 100 thousand, but i miscalculated GM – in their case Europe is bad market for them with Chevy withdrawing i though it will go slower, but basically they lost almost all Chevy sales in EU this year except 1st few months when decline wasn´t so drasticall + i miscalculated South America, where both GM and VW have big market shares, while VW somehow compensate it with EU doing better than expected. So GM won´t pass 10 million, VW and Toyota easily will unless something happens and difference will be clearly bigger between Toyota, VW to GM than between Toyota vs VW

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