Times Five

New Zealand’s new car market is tiny by global standards. Here are five big global numbers that show that, writes Damien O’Carroll.

27,000

No-one anywhere, ever has considered the Pontiac Aztek a sales success. General Motors projected up to 75,000 sales a year, with 30,000 being considered the break-even point.

It never got close. The Aztek’s best sales were between 2001 and 2003, when it sold just over 27,000 units per year.

But those miserable sales for the Aztek would represent a good year for New Zealand’s best-selling brand. Toyota New Zealand sold 21,366 passenger vehicles last year (and 10,924 commercial vehicles). Its not looking on track to repeat that, but so far it is sitting on Aztek numbers for 2019. And that’s not considered a failure by a long shot.

127,000

OK, so our market is tiny. We get that, but here is something that really puts it in a truly tiny perspective. In a good month, Ford can sell more F-Series trucks than our entire new car market can support in a year.

It does have to be a really good month – the record is 126,905 sold in July 2005 – and if you include utes in our sales figures it is probably a bit under, but that is still a single month compared to our annual total.

In fact, at its current sales rates, Ford sells one new F-Series roughly every 26 seconds, which is around the time it would have taken you to read this.

1.36 million

The single biggest yearly sales numbers for a car (1.36 million in 2005) was by possibly the most boring car on Earth – the 2005 Toyota Corolla, which, even by Corolla standards, was staggeringly dull.

Toyota New Zealand has sold around 270,000 new Corollas in New Zealand since it first launched it here – and that doesn’t count used imports – which is an average of 4000 a year. That would mean that Avis, Hertz and Budget would really need to pick up their purchasing game to meet that sales record, or we would need around 350 more rental companies purchasing at the same rate to break Toyota’s record here.

21 million

Here’s a big number – 21,529,464. That’s the total number sold of the biggest-selling single model of all time – the Volkswagen Type 1, commonly known as the Beetle.

While it had a few tweaks over the years, the same basic design sold worldwide between 1938 and 2003, which also makes it the longest running single model in production too.

That means that in some dystopian alternate universe where Kiwi new car buyers could only buy Beetles – and we bought it at our current rate of new car sales (about 100,000 per year, not counting utes) – we would still have about 150 years to go before we ran out.

46 million

And here’s the biggest number of all – the number of cars called ‘‘Corolla’’ that Toyota has sold over the years.

Corolla is the single biggestselling nameplate in the automotive industry, with more than 46 million being sold since the name first appeared in 1966. That’s across 12 generations of car, including the time the name was dropped from the hatch (except for the Australian and New Zealand markets) and it just continued as a sedan.

To put that into a local perspective, Mercedes-Benz sold just under 2300 cars in New Zealand last year – on average Toyota has built and sold that many Corollas every single day for the past 53 years.