Toyota dethrones Volkswagen as biggest car group by sales

Toyota Motor has regained its crown as the world’s biggest car company by sales, displacing Volkswagen as the embattled German manufacturer grapples with the fallout from its emissions cheating scandal.

Volkswagen had overtaken Toyota in global sales for the first half of 2015, threatening to end the Japanese group’s three-year reign as the world’s top-selling carmaker.

Toyota sold just over 7.49m vehicles in the nine months to September, 5.85m of which were outside Japan, while Volkswagen sold 7.43m. In the first six months Toyota sold 5.02m vehicles to VW’s 5.04m. Both saw sales fall 1.5 per cent for the nine months on a year-on-year basis.

The reversal could prove the tip of the iceberg for Volkswagen, which is engulfed in the worst scandal in its 78-year history after admitting to manipulating emissions test data on its diesel vehicles in the US and Europe.

Any impact on sales has yet to be felt: VW sales in the US and Europe actually increased in the nine-month period, even in September when the scandal broke growing 7.3 per cent and 3.8 per cent respectively.
Consumers would only have been aware of the problems on emissions tests for around two weeks of the reporting period, minimising its impact.

Instead the sales dip for the first nine months of the year reflected a slowdown in emerging markets, with sales in Brazil down 33.4 per cent and sales in China down 5.2 per cent. Sales in Russia, a market under acute pressure from western sanctions and a plunge in the rouble, fell 37.6 per cent.

Analysts expect the gloom to be far more widespread for Volkswagen in the final quarter of the year as it counts the cost of the scandal and sets about repairing the damage.

Volkswagen faces large fines, repair costs and lawsuits and is scaling back annual investment to the tune of €1bn at the core VW brand. Matthias Müller, its new chief executive, wants to recall up to 11m vehicles affected worldwide by the end of 2016. 

The scandal has scythed Volkswagen’s market capitalisation and resulted in a management reshuffle at the top.

This week it emerged that the EU’s top environmental official alerted his colleagues that motor manufacturers were gaming European emissions tests more than two years before US authorities uncovered widespread cheating at VW, according to internal European Commission documents obtained by the Financial Times.