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By EWAN KENNEDY
12 April 2010
During
March, Toyota sold its five millionth vehicle in Australia.
Unfortunately, Toyota says it can’t exactly specify which car it
was or on what date it sold. Which is a pity, because this is
obviously a huge occasion for the Japanese company and it would
have been nice to put a name to the car and the buyer.
Toyota is a major player in many areas of the automotive industry
in this country and has been for the past 47 years. This is a
relatively short history compared with Ford and Holden, but it's a
significant period when you consider that Japanese vehicles were
held in such low regard in their earliest days. How things have
changed, ‘Made in Japan’ is now a proud boast of anyone
selling products from that country.
Around 2.1 million of the sales were of commercial vehicles, the
other 2.9 million were passenger models.
Such has been the pace of expansion of Toyota that the latest
million sales took less than five years, while more than 20 years
were required to sell the first million.
The number one seller has been the Corolla, a car that was built
here for many years, though nowadays all are full imports. Some
1.1 million have been retailed to date. Toyota Australia says ours
was the first export market to receive this iconic model. It also
claims ours was the first country outside Japan to build the
Corolla, though the Americans are apparently disputing this fact.
Camry, which is still produced in Australia, sits in second place
in the Toyota sales tree with 740,000. Hot on the wheels of the
Camry comes the Toyota LandCruiser (including Prado) with sales
only a few thousand lower than the Camry.
Toyota Camry is invaluable to Australia because it brings in many
millions of export dollars from quite a few countries;
particularly those in the Middle East, where you see them
everywhere. Indeed, more Aussie built Camrys are sold outside this
country than locally.
VFacts sales figures that came in just as we were putting this
piece together show that Toyota has just completed its fifth
straight year (60 months) at the head of the sales charts. It
seems that five is Toyota Australia's lucky number at the moment.
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Marque Publishing Company
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