Sales figures released today by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) confirm Toyota has locked-in its 10th consecutive year as Australia’s number one automotive brand.
In September, Toyota racked-up sales of 17,300, talking the Japanese giant’s 2012 sales total to 159,111 – that’s 21.1 per-cent up on this time last year. Heading into the final three months of the year, Toyota leads second-place Holden (85,345) by 73,700 units and not even Black Caviar could make up that much ground in the run to the finish line.
And they’ll be waking-up with sore heads out at Mazda Australia’s head office in Notting Hill (Melbourne) after justified festivities to celebrate an all-time record month with 10,093 sales vaulting the Japanese company into second-place for September. A highlight for Mazda was again the Mazda3 – 4,276 sales in September representing the best-ever monthly result for the ‘3’ and cementing its position as Australia’s best-selling individual car model.
Holden was third for the month with sales of 8,955 vehicles and has accounted for 77,862 sales so far in 2012.
Fourth-placed Hyundai reported 7,815 sales for September and, with 68,460 sales so far in 2012, faces a tough challenge to peg-back Mazda’s lead of 9,402 units in the quest to be the leading import brand for the year.
And the fifth-best-selling brand in September was Ford with 7,764 sales.
Nissan recorded its best September result since becoming a full-line importer – 6224 sales. Nissan X-TRAIL sales were up by 37 per-cent on September last year and in fact logged its best-ever month, Nissan Navara D22 sales were up by 50 per-cent on September last year and Nissan Dualis sales were up by 20 per-cent on September last year.
General Motor’s start-up German brand Opel was impressive with 174 sales in its first month in Australia – 100 of them were Opel Astra models.
In September, while the large car segment was again down (by 27.5 per-cent), and medium cars were down (by 1.3 per-cent), a 16.2 per-cent in small car sales contributed to passenger car sales overall climbing by 3.2 per-cent compared to September 2011.
SUV sales were again strong – 4,301 representing a 20.7 per-cent improvement on last year.
