Toyota Corolla is Australia's best selling car in 2014

Forget Holden versus Ford. The new battle is Toyota Corolla versus Mazda3 -- and now the score is two-all.

The Toyota Corolla was Australia’s top-selling car for the second year in a row as sales of our historical favourites, the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon, hit a new rock bottom.

The Corolla may be the world’s biggest selling vehicle, with more than 40 million sold since 1966, but it has only ever hit the top of the Australian charts in the past two years.

The Corolla was in a neck and neck race with the Mazda3 -- the car that ended the Holden Commodore’s record 15-year winning streak in 2011 and 2012 -- all year.

The reigning champion Corolla overtook the Mazda3 in the year-to-date tally in July by just 21 sales -- but the pair swapped the monthly lead three times in the past five months.

In the end the Toyota Corolla took top honours with a tally of 43,735, just 422 sales ahead of the Mazda3 with 43,313 deliveries, according to confidential preliminary figures obtained by News Corp Australia.

As a sign of Australia’s diverse and highly competitive car market -- with more than 64 brands on sale -- the Corolla became top-seller having sold barely half as many cars as the Commodore did at its peak 10 years ago.

However, the battle between the Mazda3 and Toyota Corolla is tighter than Holden versus Ford: in decades of Commodore versus Falcon rivalry, the finish between the top two sellers was never this close.

Meanwhile, Toyota as a brand eclipsed 200,000 sales for the 10th time and was market leader for a record 12th year in a row.

But it wasn’t all good news for the Japanese giant; Toyota sales were down for the third year in a row, to 203,498 deliveries, a significant drop from its peak of 238,983 new cars in 2008.

Holden posted its worst sales in almost a quarter of a century (with 106,000 deliveries) and is on track to be overtaken by Mazda (100,700) and Hyundai (100,010) in 2015.

Ford also had a shocker (79,700), posting its worst sales in more than 23 years and the 10th year in a row in decline.

The preliminary figures show the new-car market has had its biggest drop since the Global Financial Crisis, down by about 2.2 per cent compared with last year’s all-time record of  1,136,227 new vehicle registrations.

Our taste in cars has also changed dramatically over the past decade. In 2005, locally made vehicles accounted for one in four (25 per cent) of all new cars sold. In 2014, less than one in 10 cars (or 9 per cent) was built locally.

Nevertheless, 2014 will still go down in history as the sixth time new-car sales passed the 1 million mark in the past seven years.

Official figures for new-car sales in 2014 will be released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries next week.