Who took the top spot in passenger car sales for 2022 in Malaysia?
The race to see who sold the most vehicles in the ‘non-national car’ segment for 2022 sees Toyota in the lead with Lexus sales numbers included.
This is the non-national car segment and it is where Proton and Perodua sales figures are NOT included. We are the ONLY country in the world with this very unique situation even though it can be clearly seen that both national car brands are working closely with foreign partners in all areas.
Still, once upon a time, there was a Malaysian leader who decided this was the best way to enrich a select group of people and it worked great.
Meanwhile, we have many other car brands investing heavily in factories and technology transfer in producing high quality and reliable vehicles for Malaysian buyers.
The two biggest ‘players’ in this segment is Honda and Toyota. Now, with Covid-19 restrictions behind us (until further notice) 2022 has seen both companies enjoying surging sales and releasing very impressive new vehicles for Malaysians to own.
UMW Toyota announced a 40 percent increase in sales for 2022 giving them a total of 101,035 units for 2022, but this included their Lexus premium brand and also their commercial and 4×4 pickup truck figures.
Interestingly, if you take just Toyota passenger vehicle sales (to compare with Honda who do not have commercial vans and a pickup truck on sale) then their total sales are 73,447 which is still a very impressive number as the very popular Veloz MPV sales started only in late 2022.
Now, with Honda Malaysia, they announced their total 2022 sales to be 80,200 which is 6,753 more than UMW Toyota’s total passenger vehicle sales for 2022.
For Honda, this is also a rather conservative figure as deliveries of the popular HR-V SUV has been slow since it was launched a few months ago due to logistic issues.
Therefore, in all fairness, we should take apple to apple comparison as above to see which company is on top and this is what we have presented above.
To make things interesting, lets look at PROTON’s announcement of 141,432 units sold in 2022. From this impressive rising sales figure, we like to congratulate PROTON on this 21 percent rise in sales from 2021.
However, from this impressive 141,432 figure, it must be noted that the Geely sourced rebadged Proton X50 SUV was the best seller at 40,681 units and the other Geely sourced rebadged Proton X70 SUV was the second best seller at 18,533 units.
Take both these vehicles out of the net total figure and you get a total of 82,218 PROTON engineered cars (Saga, Persona and even the Exora MPV) sold in 2022. This is still higher than Honda and also Toyota total passenger car sales.
