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Toyota has claimed the best-selling car brand spot for January 2018 in Ireland, with 4,393 registrations in the month. That puts it ahead of Hyundai on 3,933 registrations, and Volkswagen on 3,590.
While the market for new cars as a whole fell by 4.8 per cent (and the number of imports climbed by 20 per cent) one bright spot, certainly for Toyota, is that hybrid sales have increased dramatically.
Buyers, it seems, are moving away from diesel (which has dropped to a 57 per cent market share for January) and only partially going back to petrol (36 per cent) with hybrids climbing by 73 per cent to a total market share of 6.26 per cent. This puts them way ahead of pure electric cars, which saw sales fall in January to just 108 cars, or 0.28 per cent of the market.
Commenting on the January sales haul, Toyota Ireland's Chief Executive Steve Tormey, said, "We're delighted with the strong start to 2018, particularly with how well our hybrid range has performed, which is ahead of our powertrain mix predictions. With close to 50 per cent hybrid mix of our total passenger car sales, it's very clear that hybrid is the best technology in the market today to meet customers' needs for more environmentally friendly and better driving experiences. With diesel now accounting for only 21 per cent of our car sales, it's clear Toyota customers are ahead of the market in their move out of diesel and into hybrid."
Of Toyota's sales, 1,026 Yaris were sold, with a 49 per cent hybrid take-up, while the Auris sold 807 units, 71 per cent of which were hybrid. The C-HR crossover has overtaken the Auris, with 813 sold, and 77 per cent of those were hybrid, while of the 582 RAV4s sold, 49 per cent were hybrid.
Steve Tormey added, "Similar to the Irish Government, Toyota too has a vision for a zero emissions society, which we believe can be a reality by 2050. To help achieve this, Toyota's self-charging hybrid cars, which are in electric mode for up to 55 per cent of the time, should be viewed as a stepping stone for consumers into full electrification. In the end, it's the customer who will decide and they've decided that hybrid is the start of their journey into electrification, which gives society most of the environmental and health benefits of full electrification but without the compromise."
So far this year, the Hyundai Tucson remains the best-selling car in the country, with 1,624 sales (a drop of 14.07 per cent compared to January last year), followed by the Nissan Qashqai (1,418 sales, up 5.27 per cent) and the Ford Focus (1,229 sales, down 20.25 per cent.
The biggest winner in January was Peugeot, which broke back into the top-ten sales chart for the first time in years, thanks to a 71 per cent increase in sales from January last year, driven largely by the 3008 and 5008 SUVs. Opel was the biggest losers, seeing sales slip by 37 per cent, and dropping out of the top-ten chart for the first time since the 1980s.
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The only other top-ten brand to experience a shift such a sizeable shift away from diesel was Nissan, with some 60 per cent of its registrations in January accounted for by petrol-powered models.