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Cathy, Thorpey, Kylie and Nikki had just shown the world that Australia can hold its own in sports and culture, we’d given quite a few of our guns away, the Millenial Bug wasn’t such a concern anymore… and three sedans dominated Aussie roads.
A quarter of a century ago, the year 2000 was just in the rear-view, and the sales charts looked very different to today.
What better time than 25 years later to look back at the cars and brands Australians were heading to the showroom for?
Not only were there fewer utes and SUVs being sold, they didn’t even make up a third of the new vehicle sales in the country combined that year.
Utes and SUVs were lumped together in the same section of the VFACTS report (the sales figures industry stakeholders, pundits and media receive each month) alongside heavy trucks.
Only 8413 new Toyota RAV4s were sold, making the Daewoo Lanos (9029 sales) more popular that year.
Compare that to 2025, when the RAV4 ranked second in sales for the year with a whopping 51,947 units, only topped by the Ranger (56,555).
Speaking of which, how did our now-favourite utes fare in 2000? The Ford Courier, the Ranger’s predecessor, sold just 6769 units, while the HiLux managed to hop into the top 10 with 21,509 sales. Still somewhat short of its 51,297 in 2025.
To be fair, if you’d asked someone if they were buying a Ford ute, the Courier wouldn’t have been the first thing to come to mind. Ford sold 13,698 Falcon utes in the year 2000, putting it well ahead of its Commodore rival’s 6361.
That can be explained easily, Holden didn't build a new ute for the VT generation Commodore of the late-’90s, instead continuing to sell the VS ute alongside the VT sedan.
The near-new AU Falcon ute (released in mid-1999) had the car-based ute market covered for the turn of the century.
Those two now-gone badges, along with the enduring Toyota Camry and the impressive Mitsubishi Magna, were impossible to avoid on Aussie roads then, with the Commodore, Falcon, Camry and Magna being first, second, third and fifth (thanks to the Corolla in fourth) most popular cars in the country in 2000.
Between them they contributed to the total 198,766 large passenger cars sold in 2000, which made up 35.9 per cent of the year’s new vehicle sales. In 2025, large passenger cars made up just 2285 sales, or 0.2 per cent of the market.
Small cars made up the other major chunk of sales back in 2000, with 154,050 sales being 27.8 per cent of the market. They were 72,222 sales and 6.0 per cent of last year’s market share.
The aforementioned Daewoo was in the top 10 brands (just) in terms of sales for the year 2000, but was the only brand in that list that no longer exists.
A scroll through the list shows other long-gone names like Daihatsu, Saab and Proton, and one not-so-long-gone name — Citroen.
Daewoo Nubira? Daihatsu Sirion? Even the Proton Satria? These forgotten cars all sold in the thousands back then.
Giants like Kia and Hyundai have come a long way, too. The brands once known for the Excel or Accent, plus the Kia Rio in its most ‘cheap and cheerful’ phase (RIP) are now global powerhouses with new technology and reliability commonly in the same sentence as their badge names.
Hyundai, at least, was still a top-10 player back then.
Below, there are tables with the most popular models and brands from the year 2000 and the figures we gleaned from the data — note the badge names have been consolidated so that cars with Commodore (for example) includes all body types.
Top 10 cars sold in Australia in 2000
| Rank | Model | Year 2000 Sales |
| 1 | Holden Commodore | 89,971 |
| 2 | Ford Falcon | 74,158 |
| 3 | Toyota Camry | 31,874 |
| 4 | Toyota Corolla | 30,576 |
| 5 | Mitsubishi Magna | 23,270 |
| 6 | Nissan Pulsar | 21,740 |
| 7 | Toyota Hilux | 21,509 |
| 8 | Mitsubishi Lancer | 20,698 |
| 9 | Holden Astra | 18,439 |
| 10 | Toyota LandCruiser | 16,935 |
Top 10 cars brands in Australia in 2000
| Rank | Brand (Make) | Year 2000 Sales |
| 1 | Toyota | 158,908 |
| 2 | Holden | 155,137 |
| 3 | Ford | 113,810 |
| 4 | Mitsubishi | 73,241 |
| 5 | Nissan | 45,867 |
| 6 | Hyundai | 45,331 |
| 7 | Honda | 30,034 |
| 8 | Mazda | 27,505 |
| 9 | Subaru | 26,647 |
| 10 | Daewoo | 20,514 |
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