JADA reports: Aqua (Prius C) was the best selling car in Japan for 2013 - 262367 units sold. Prius came second - 253711 exemplars.
Is there a way to find out what percentage this was of total sales in Japan? I've been totally unable to find figures for Australia... all of the reporting here could be described as generally bored - there were no major shifts in market shares for them to report on and of course motoring journos aren't interested in hybrids. I'm taking from the fact that they haven't mentioned anything that there was no major decline and from the fact that Toyota hasn't said anything that there was no major increase. You'd think at least on an issue that is topical here - local manufacturing, after GM Holden announced they will stop - the Camry Hybrid would at least get a mention, but no.
Thanks. From that, the Toyota Aqua seems to have been 4.88% on its own, with the Prius on 4.72%. Toyota overall was 28.58%, a notable drop from 30.66% in 2012. It seems the Prius had a 20.1% drop in sales, which would not have helped.
Hybrid sales are dropping here, despite cars sales hitting pre 2007 levels for the first time since the crash. My take on it is that Toyota are just charging way too much and cash strapped owners just don't understand or trust the technology and don't like the much higher cost. There have been a number of Toyota hybrid tv commercials pushed again. A hybrid saves you money (assuming it doesn't break down), but fully loading them and selling that way over and above a petrol or diesel isn't good for sales. And this is in a country with petrol costing over $8 a gallon. Combined stats (18 models) PRIUS - How Many Left? There are also a number of economical petrol and diesel cars being released which have amazingly high mpg figures, some hitting nearly 90 mpg UK combined (using the Euro test), compared to the Prius at 72 mpg. Now I appreciate these cars won't get 90 mpg, but they'll get 70+. That is high and they're much cheaper than the Prius and almost as large. Most economical car 2013 | Auto Express
The japanese is a very closed car market with many large barriers against foreign car makers, importing less than 10% of foreign name plates. There was a spike in imports after the tsunami, but IIRC when the shortage died down the barriers went back up. So no, ford sells a tiny amount of cars in japan. VW and BMW seem to be the biggest imports.
i'll never understand why we don't treat other countries the way they treat us. it can't be that our public servants are doing what's best for themselves, and not our country.
Would you buy the Prius at $50K+ if we impose import duties like Japan to foreign cars? Actually what we are doing is to make things affordable to everyone.
the ends don't always justify the means. we would be a stronger country if we did more exporting and less importing of cheap products.
There have been numerous case studies on barriers to imports on cars, and each item may be different. When we had a tarrif on imported cars in the 70s, it seems that this reduced the fuel economy of the fleet, increasing oil imports. The 80s got rid of the tarrifs and got voluntary import restrictions. This could be thought of as a hidden tax on consumers for restricted imports, given mainly to the american car producers. It did get much japanese production moved to the US though. The 2000s shifted trade ballances as it became less expensive to produce cars in the US than Japan, but oil imports became more of the trade deficit. The Japanese economy is now very week, and the car market looks quite bad, so how much would the US gain opening it up. The chinese market is very profitable, much more than the Japanese (other than when its government pours money in), and american car makers are making record sales in China. The question is what we gain now by restricting imports or adding taxes to the prius and some other japanese cars? Absolutely if we could do it in the way that gets japanese car companies to manufacture here it would be more fair, but Toyota and Honda spend a lot of money on PACs to get their point of view to congress. Toyota even got the most money out of cash for clunkers, while the Japanese version was written to keep money from american companies.
Looks to me like that means the Aqua/Prius and Aqua/Prius C combined accounted for about 10% of all new car sales in Japan last year. That's quite dominant for one model.
The prius did better than predicted considering the end of some targeted tax credits for hybrids. There were shortages of aquas for much of 2012. There still is a high gas tax, giving incentives for efficient cars, but the incentives in 2012 were a key driver of very high prius sales in 2012.
...that's a lot of Prii...go Japan! Would be interesting to know total hybrids/plug-ins % of Japan auto sales.
