10,159,336 – that’s how many cars Toyota sold last year, including those carrying the Lexus badge. Add in the vehicles shipped by its Daihatsu and Hino subsidiaries, and the total rises to 10,821,480. Even though deliveries dropped by 3.7 percent compared to the previous year, Toyota still came out on top. It beat the Volkswagen Group for the fifth year in a row, solidifying its dominance in the automotive sector.
But have you ever wondered how many Toyotas are on the road today? We now have an estimate straight from the Japanese automaker: approximately 150 million vehicles in operation. There’s a financial motive behind the company’s decision to share this number all of a sudden. Basically, Toyota wants to generate more revenue from its existing fleet by boosting customer support for parts and accessories.
Photo by: Toyota
The company also aims to grow revenue through increased used vehicle sales and encourage owners to subscribe to “connected services.” That’s just a polished way of saying subscriptions. To give you a few examples from the United States, Drive Connect costs $15 a month and gives users access to “up-to-date navigation, live-agent navigation assistance, and a seamless virtual assistant.” Integrated Streaming, also $15 monthly, enables music playback via Apple Music and Amazon Music. Wi-Fi Connect, through AT&T, costs $25 per month.
Toyota also focuses more on insurance and financing services to strengthen its balance sheet. CFO Yoichi Miyazaki even claims that the company can achieve higher operating income from these sources than from selling new cars, which still perform well despite broader industry turbulence. The estimation is for the 2026 fiscal year in Japan, which started on April 1 and runs through March 31, 2026.
Circling back to that staggering number of Toyotas on the road: how does it compare to the global total? Automotive research firm Hedges & Company estimates that around 1.64 billion vehicles are used worldwide. Assuming that number is reasonably accurate, though it’s hard to pinpoint precisely, about 9.15 percent of all vehicles currently on the road are Toyotas.
According to the latest figures published by Toyota, total global production reached 300 million vehicles as of September 2023, some 88 years after the company built its first car. Technically, it was a Model G1 truck, produced by the (deep breath) Automotive Production Division of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in August 1935. That year, the company made just 20 units. 1968 was the first year when the company built more than 1 million vehicles, and in 2012, it became the first automaker to assemble over 10 million cars in a year.
As of September 2023, 180.52 million cars had been built in Japan, while 119.6 million were assembled abroad. Unsurprisingly, the Corolla remains Toyota’s highest-volume product, with cumulative global production reaching 53.4 million units by the end of September 2023.
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