reveal that Toyota, Hino, and Daihatsu combined to sell 923,180 vehicles in August. This represents a 9.4% increase over August 2022 and included 757,602 sales outside of Japan. The Toyota brand alone sold 853,285 vehicles in August, a 9.8% increase, and of these, 732,859 were sold internationally.Daihatsu
produced 924,509 vehicles throughout the month. Of these, 798,771 were for the Toyota brand, representing a 4.1% spike over August 2022. Interestingly, production of Toyota vehicles outside of Japan fell to 560,052 but production inside Japan swelled by a considerable 21.8% to 238,719 vehicles. Worldwide production across the entire Toyota group has risen for each of the past eight months.
The Toyota brand itself has sold 6,650,425 vehicles in the first eight months of 2023 with Daihatsu selling 521,287 and Hino selling 89,654 vehicles. Toyota sales outside of Japan have risen by 1.5% to 5,510,606 while those inside of Japan have jumped 34.6% to 1,139,819 units. Toyota and Lexus sales rose by 3% in Europe and 63% in South Korea but dropped 4% in Asia and 6% in China.
The number of battery-electric vehicles being sold by Toyota remains small. In fact, it sold just 11,880 EVs in August and this year has sold 65,467 BEVs. While this is significantly more than the 24,000 that Toyota had sold by this time last year, the automaker still has a long way to go if it is to sell 1.5 million BEVs every year by 2026, as chief executive Koji Sato has estimated.