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Are there cracks starting to appear in Toyota’s seemingly impervious armour?
Toyota has long dominated the Australian car industry. So much so that for the last several years, nearly one in every five new cars sold has been one of the Japanese brand’s options. But an unlikely contender has emerged to potentially halt that seemingly unstoppable sales success.
China’s BYD was Toyota’s closest sales rival in April and has enjoyed sales growth of more than 110 per cent in the first fourth months of 2026. Toyota has been off to an unusually slow start, dropping more than 22 per cent of its sales over the same period.
Despite the two brands starting 2026 in opposite sales trajectories, BYD Australia Chief Operating Officer Stephen Collins isn’t focused on getting the better of Toyota.
“ I think that's an issue for them,” he told CarsGuide. “All I focus on is what we can control. And at the end of the day, where you finish at the end of the month, the end of the year, the end of the quarter, it's just a result. It's just a fallout of what you've been able to do. Toyota might be in a situation where their orders are fine, but they can't get the stock for whatever reason, I don't know.”
Not that Collins is aiming low, with a clear target of finishing within the top three selling brands for 2026, which would represent a major improvement over its seventh place on the charts in 2025.
“Look, I think I said this at the start of the year and a few people looked at me like I was a bit crazy, saying that, I think we want to be in or around the top three [in total sales],” he said.
“I genuinely think that's where we should be. Where we go from there, who knows? There's so many variables, who knows? But I think that starts to put us in a leadership bracket of brands. And we've just gotta keep getting better - that's it. Toyota has been so good for so long because they do so many things really well and we've got to do better.”
The reality is Toyota remains comfortably ahead of all of its key rivals thanks to its enormous lead over the rest of the market. Despite its major sales drop to start the year, Toyota has still sold almost 60,000 new vehicles (59,675 to be precise) between January and April, with no other brand surpassing 28,000 sales.
BYD has sold 25,243 new models so far this year, which puts it in fifth place year-to-date and less than 1000 units behind fourth-placed Ford. To underline just how steep BYD’s rise has been, in April 2025 the brand was not even amongst the top 10 selling companies, so it is on a very dramatic upward trajectory.
Part of Collins’ plan is to grow sustainably but quickly, expanding its line-up to follow Toyota’s strategy of a broad array of popular models across multiple market segments.
“We want to do all that, but do it quicker and better than anyone,” said Collins. “I'm not saying that arrogantly, I'm just saying that's the mindset that we need to have now. The mindset for us, for me, now is, ‘oh, we're not a challenger brand anymore.’ We're beyond that. We just need to be better.”
To that end, BYD Australia negotiated with its head office for the use of one of BYD’s eight car carrier ships, the BYD Zhengzhou, to rush a delivery of 4800 new vehicles to Australia for delivery. This is one shipment of a planned 30,000 new vehicles scheduled to arrive before the end of the financial year and Collins said the “vast majority” were already sold.
Beyond that, the brand has just expanded the Shark 6 ute range with a new flagship model, the Performance, and a new, fleet-friendly Cab Chassis option. In addition to that BYD has announced two new models and two facelifted models will be added before the end of 2026, as part of an on-going expansion that has also included the Atto 1 and Atto 2 electric vehicles as well as the Sealion 5 and Sealion 8 SUVs recently.
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