Taiwan February 2015: Lexus NX breaks into Top 10

Lexus NX

* See the Top 10 best-selling brands and Top 50 models by clicking on the title *

The Taiwanese new car market is up a superb 19% year-on-year in February to 24,933 registrations, still half the January figure due to Lunar New Year celebrations, therefore bringing the year-to-date total to 72,919 units, up 12% on 2014. A very good start of 2015 in Taiwan. While the Top 3 brands are unchanged on January and FY2014 (Toyota-Nissan-Mitsubishi), the big story this month is the 4th place of premium Japanese carmaker Lexus with 1,981 sales and a mammoth 7.9% market share, whereas it did not rank inside the January Top 10. This performance is partly due to the launch of the cheaper 200t variant of the NX SUV, hithertoo only available as a 300h hybrid, propelling the Lexus NX nameplate to a record-breaking 10th place in the overall Taiwanese models ranking with 528 sales and 2.1% share.

Unstoppable: the Toyota Corolla

In other news, Toyota monopolises the podium once again with the Corolla (8.7%), RAV4 (4.2%) and Wish (3.6%) followed by the Nissan Tiida (3.5%) whereas the Nissan Sentra is back up to 6th place with 2.9% of the market. The Luxgen U6 Turbo slips out of the Top 10 at #12 and the Honda Fit (#13) and Mitsubishi Outlander (#15) both maintain themselves at levels much higher than a year ago thanks to new models.

Previous month: Taiwan January 2015: Luxgen U6 Turbo and Mazda3 shine

One year ago: Taiwan February 2014: Luxgen U6 Turbo resists at #6

Full February 2015 Top 10 brands and Top 50 models below.