The Japanese automaker recorded a 3.7 percent decline in sales of the group’s global units last year, including sales of the small car manufacturer “Daihatsu” and the truck unit “Hino Motors”.
The decline is largely due to a sharp drop in sales in Japan, where the automaker faced the fallout of governance issues on certification testing procedures, especially in “Daihatsu”.
Earlier this month, its second German competitor “Volkswagen Group” announced a 2.3 percent drop in unit sales last year to just over 9 million vehicles, as it seeks to cut costs at home and fight a price war in the key market China.
Sales of branded cars owned by”Toyota”, which include “Lexus”, fell by 1.4 percent from the previous year in 2024 to 10.2 million cars due to a double-digit decline in Japan.
While Toyota has sold a record number of cars overall, partly due to demand for its hybrid cars in the United States, it has seen unit sales in China fall by 6.9 percent amid intense price competition in the world’s largest car market, ” he said.
Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles accounted for a record 40.8 percent, and battery-electric vehicles accounted for 1.4 percent.
In a separate context, Toyota has decided not to introduce the manual transmission class of its “four runner “from the SUV mid-size multi-purpose car category, almost 24 years after the launch of this car, while it will continue to provide the manual version of the” four runner “category with a luggage compartment, known as”Toma Tacoma”.
The website “car & driver”, specializing in automotive topics, noted that the absence of the category of cars with manual transmission in the sixth generation of the car “four runner” was not a surprise, since the previous two generations did not include this category either. “Simply because there is no demand for it,”the Japanese company said in response to a question about why there is no manual transmission car class in the new generation.
A Toyota spokesman said that the lack of a manual transmission class in the new four runner cars is due to “lack of strong customer demand for it,” adding that some customers may already be interested in getting a four runner with a manual transmission, but there are not enough of them to produce this class.
Answering the question of whether the company is ready to reproduce the manual transmission class if it finds sufficient demand for it, Toyota said: “since the structure is similar to the Tacoma, gasoline-powered models can be with manual transmission”.
The car & driver website states that ” the world is unlikely to see a new manual four runner. However, if Toyota were to make a manual one using the TNGA – F platform that the four runner SUV class shares”with the redesigned Tacoma class, it would feature a 2.4-liter 270-horsepower four-wheel drive turbo engine with all-wheel drive”.
