Toyota Motor Corp., outsold Volkswagen AG for the fourth straight month in October to remain world’s top-selling automaker so far this year, Toyota said on Friday.
Toyota said in Tokyo its sales shot after the German carmaker suffered following the diesel emissions scandal.
It said its group vehicle sales totaled 8.35 million in the January-October period, more than the 8.26 million vehicles delivered by Volkswagen during the same period.
Toyota has continuously out sold Volkswagen on a year-to-date basis since July.
Earlier this month, Volkswagen said its Volkswagen brand sales fell 5.3 per cent year-on-year in October.
This was the first full month after Europe’s biggest automaker admitted that it cheated diesel emissions tests in some of its cars sold in the U.S., since 2009.
Group sales at the Japanese automaker in the year through October eased 1.2 per cent from the previous year, while Volkswagen group sales for same period eased 1.7 per cent on the year.
In a related development, Volkswagen is facing slowing orders for new cars with consumers shunning purchases, VW’s top labour representative told reporters on Friday.
“There is caution in buying,” the German company’s works council Chief Bernd Osterloh said in Wolfsburg.
Osterloh said the caution was because the automaker admitted this month it understated fuel usage and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
“The CO2 issue has triggered a greater crisis of confidence (in VW products) than the nitrogen (emissions) issue,” he said.
VW said on November 3 it had manipulated the level of CO2 emissions in about 800,000 cars sold mainly in Europe.
It said it was expecting costs of at least 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) including compensation payments to customers.
Two weeks later, VW said the CO2 cheating, which mainly involved diesel cars, affected more petrol-powered vehicles than previously disclosed.
The revelations about fuel economy and CO2 emissions have deepened the crisis at VW, which initially centred on software used on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that VW admitted in September.
Global sales of VW group vehicles fell 3.5 per cent in October, though they edged up 0.5 per cent in Germany.
VW has denied reports that orders and sales have started to plunge in the wake of the CO2 admissions.
