Toyota Australia targets record fourth quarter on path to 31st straight sales win
Toyota Australia expects to sell a record number of vehicles in the final three months of 2026 despite a heavily reduced year-to-date tally, as incoming stock of the new RAV4 and HiLux rebuilds a lead eroded by BYD's mid-year surge.
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Record final quarter targeted despite lower 2026 sales
Toyota Australia expects to sell a record number of vehicles in the final three months of 2026 and finish the year with more than 220,000 sales, securing its 31st consecutive year as the country's best-selling car brand. Speaking at a media briefing at the company's Port Melbourne headquarters, Toyota Australia vice president of sales John Pappas told CarExpert the brand is on track to remain at the top of the local sales charts "by a healthy margin". 1
"The last quarter for us will be a record. The last time we did this type of volume in the last quarter was in 2020, and we'll do more than what we did then. That was around 66,000 or thereabouts, so we'll do more than that," Mr Pappas said, according to CarExpert. Toyota sold 66,179 vehicles in the final three months of 2020. To reach 220,000 sales for the full year, Toyota needs 67,056 deliveries across October to December. 1
That target sits well above the brand's best quarter so far in 2026, the July-to-September period, in which it delivered 57,803 vehicles, down from 63,181 in the same three months of 2025. 1
Year-to-date shortfall after slow start
Despite the strong finish in prospect, Toyota's 2026 result to date is materially lower than last year. CarExpert reports the brand leads year-to-date sales with 152,944 deliveries, ahead of BYD on 76,614, but that figure is down 15.9 per cent, or 28,865 vehicles, year-on-year, the second-largest percentage decline among the top-10 brands behind Mazda, which is down 16.2 per cent. 1
The weakness was concentrated early in the year. Toyota sales fell 23.0 per cent in the first quarter, with 44,490 vehicles sold between January and March 2026 against 57,797 over the same period in 2025. September's 3.5 per cent year-on-year decline was the brand's smallest monthly fall of 2026 so far, following a biggest monthly drop of 30.7 per cent in May, CarExpert reports. 1
Toyota said the changeover to the new RAV4 mid-size SUV, which had a delayed introduction in early 2026, and the new-generation HiLux launched in December 2025 had impacted its sales. "We knew coming into this year we weren't going to have a really good start based on RAV4 and HiLux sales," Mr Pappas told CarExpert. "We're seeing a lot of stock now. The stock's coming through and we've got the demand for it. Our challenge now is making sure that we can get it in and process the stock." 1
BYD's June near-miss
The scale of the competitive challenge emerged in June, when VFACTS data reported by GoAuto showed BYD sold 18,881 vehicles, a 131.5 per cent increase year-on-year, to finish just 243 sales behind Toyota's 19,124 for the month, the closest any car-maker had come to matching Toyota's local monthly volume in at least two decades. With Tesla and Polestar figures from the Electric Vehicle Council included, Toyota's June market share dropped to 13.7 per cent against BYD's 13.5 per cent. 3
GoAuto reported BYD had jumped from eighth position on the sales ladder to second over the past 12 months, while Toyota surrendered 7.4 percentage points of market share across the financial year. BYD Australia chief operating officer Stephen Collins told GoAuto in July that the June result was "outstanding, but it's not the new normal", crediting a commitment to deliver 30,000 vehicles across the second quarter. 3
BYD has not come close to toppling Toyota since that June result, according to CarExpert, whose September figures show Toyota sold more than twice as many vehicles as next-best BYD, with Ford, Kia and Mazda rounding out the top five. 1
Forecast lifted through the year as supply arrived
Toyota's 2026 sales forecast has climbed repeatedly as supply improved. In April, The Beep reported Toyota had raised its target to more than 210,000 vehicles, a figure no automotive brand has ever hit in Australia, after roughly 44,000 first-quarter deliveries. Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Franchise Operations John Pappas said at the time: "With the demand we are seeing and the increased supply coming, we now expect to exceed 210,000 sales - a milestone no other automotive brand has achieved in Australia." 4
By July, GoAuto reported Toyota's full-year expectation had risen to more than 230,000 sales, which Pappas said would be the sixth year in the brand's Australian history achieving that milestone, supported by additional production secured from Toyota Motor Corporation. The Beep also reported standout early performers including the bZ4X, Camry, Corolla Cross, HiAce and LandCruiser 300, with the bZ4X expected to clear 5,000 sales in 2026 after just 1,041 in 2025. 34
CarSauce reported in July that Toyota had secured an extra 20,000 vehicles over a couple of months, including a latest 10,000-unit uplift, and that Pappas said the brand would not make a public spectacle of incoming supply, telling the publication: "No, that's not our style... It's all about for us reducing lead times for our customers." CarSauce also reported Toyota was planning to sell more than 40,000 RAV4s in 2026, with the plug-in hybrid expected to account for about 30 per cent of RAV4 sales. 2
Wait times and logistics pressures
CarExpert reports the typical customer wait time for a new Toyota is currently between three and six months, with the company working to bring that closer to three months by prioritising its higher-volume models. Mr Pappas said lead times were far longer at the beginning of the year and had been clawed back with the support of Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan. 1
The remaining constraint is shipping rather than demand, according to Pappas. "It's not really an issue of demand, it's actually an issue of getting the cars - logistics and getting the cars shipment-wise. Based on those constraints, we're very challenged by those types of numbers, but we'll do over 220,000," he told CarExpert, citing the "geopolitical side of logistics" as the biggest current challenge. 1
Wait times for popular models have been elevated through much of the year. The Beep reported in April that waiting periods for the LandCruiser 300, HiLux, LandCruiser Prado and RAV4 stood at three to six months nationally, while CarSauce reported in July that average wait times across the range were three to six months and that Pappas considered that "a fair lead time, considering demand is stronger than supply". 124
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