Can anything knock Toyota from its No.1 spot? Yes, this | Opinion

Toyota is big in Australia. Really big. So big that rival car company executives go to work each day knowing full well that they will probably never be able to sell more vehicles than Toyota. That’s because for the past 19 consecutive years Toyota has been the best-selling car brand in Australia. And not just by a little bit, but by so much that catching up or even beating Toyota is impossible… or is it? 

The new-car sales results for 2022 weren’t surprising. Toyota had won again for the year. Not just won, but pulverised the competitors with 231,050 cars sold in the past 12 months. The nearest rival was Mazda with 95,718 sales, followed by Kia, Mitsubishi and Hyundai in that order all on 70-something thousand.

None of them are anywhere near Toyota. Not even Mazda would be in range even if it somehow magically doubled its sales. It’s been the same story for two decades now. Trying to catch Toyota is like trying to reel in the race leader of the Bathurst 1000 after they’ve lapped you twice. 

Toyota’s number one streak in Australia started in the early 1990s when it was the best selling car brand from 1991-1994 with Corolla, Camry and HiLux winning over Aussies. The brand came back to the top again for 1998 and 2000, and then every year since 2003.

You’d have to go back to the 1970s and ’80s when Holden and Ford ruled the roads in Australia to find a time when Toyota wasn’t king.

What about the emerging Chinese brands? Well, it may be exciting to think they’ll have a chance but they’ll need to get past the recently established players such as Hyundai and Kia who have fought hard to earn our trust, a place in our driveways and a seat at the top 10 table. They aren’t about to give that up easily.

Yes, MG is a rising star. The Chinese-owned British brand first entered the top 10 yearly sales results in ninth place in 2021 with 39,025 units sold and then moved into seventh place in 2022 with 49,582. But MG is still so far off that even if it kept adding an extra 10,000 sales every 12 months, we’d be ringing in the year 2041 and most likely wearing spacesuits before it was shifting what Toyota is right now.

So it’s Toyota’s race to lose. And that’s entirely possible. 

Look at Holden. A seemingly bullet-proof company with excellent Australian made-cars, a loyal-as-you-can-get following and generations of know-how. 

But as consumer’s tastes changed to SUVs and 4x4 utes, Holden continued to do what it had always done and pumped out sedans and a mediocre 4x4 ute, while supplementing its range with underwhelming SUVs rebadged from the United States or South Korea. 

To be fair, towards the end Holden’s hands were tied and it could only do as it was told by a parent company that wasn’t committed to maintaining the brand in Australia.

So could misjudging the tastes of Australians bring about the fall of Toyota locally? Could Toyota’s slow response to rolling out electric vehicles here be the weakness its rivals have been waiting to exploit? 

In 2022 sales of electric vehicles were up 548.9 per cent compared to the year before and this year more than 20 additional new electric vehicles will be launched in Australia. One of them will be the Bz4X -  the first Toyota EV to come to Australia.

When it comes to electric vehicles, Toyota’s hesitancy or strategy has given Hyundai a five-year head start in Australia with the original Ioniq arriving in 2018. Kia’s first EV to come here was the Niro in 2021, the same year that MG began introducing electric cars to Australians open to leaving brand loyalty behind in search of an affordable way into an EV.

We saw how those brands with good SUVs at the ready were able to gain an advantage over their rivals as the market began to turn away from large sedans. Toyota was one of them with its RAV4, but in the case of EVs the same brand appears to have been caught out this time as the market pivots again.  

The only other situation which could see Toyota knocked off its throne is a scenario similar to the ‘diesel-gate’ scandal which rocked Volkswagen in 2015. But even then Toyota is so mind bogglingly big that, like Volkswagen, it could probably absorb the damage. While a scenario like this could make Toyota trip, it might not fall.

So there we have it - do we just declare Toyota the overall winner at ‘Cars’ and play something else? Who knows what the future holds. But we do know that despite it feeling like nothing will change we know that nothing always stays the same.