EVs Accounted For Less Than One Percent of Toyota’s 2023 Sales

While Tesla has been making headlines recently for their Model Y being both 2023’s best-selling vehicle and the first electric vehicle (EV) to be crowned the world’s best-selling vehicle, Japanese automotive icon Toyota is still the top dog for most cars sold.

Toyota was not only the top-selling vehicle maker in the world in 2023, for the fourth year in a row, but it also delivered more vehicles than ever before. The company achieved that with EVs only accounting for 0.926 percent of its total units shipped for the year, according to a report from Motor1.

Toyota by the Numbers

The Japanese automaker had a total of 11,233,039 vehicle sales last year. Of those more than 11 million sales, EVs accounted for a measly 104,018 units sold. Hybrid vehicles accounted for 3,420,004 sales, with mild hybrid cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles selling 26,859 and 124,755 units, respectively. The company’s fuel-cell vehicles added 3,921 units sold. In total, Toyota sold 3,679,557 electrified cars in 2023.

The Volkswagen Group had the second most units sold last year, with 9.24 million. However, regarding all-electric vehicles sold, VW beat out Toyota with around 770,000 units sold.

These numbers are not surprising, given that Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda recently made headlines for his claim that EVs will never account for more than 30 percent of sales in the automotive market. While some EV makers, such as the mentioned Tesla and Chinese automaker BYD, saw their electrified automotives enjoy significant sales growth and numbers for 2023, neither of them can hold a candle to Toyota’s overall success. Tesla sold around 1.8 million cars last year, with BYD selling 1.6 million EVs and 1.4 million hybrids for approximately 3 million electrified vehicle sales last year. As impressive as those sales numbers are for Tesla and BYD, their tallies still trail Toyota’s 3.6 million electrified units sold.

It’s also worth noting that while Tesla’s Model Y was the year’s best-seller, the second and third best-selling vehicles of 2023 were the Toyota RAV 4 (1.07 million units sold) and the Toyota Corolla (1.01 million units sold.) However, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs), a bee in Toyota’s bonnet, sold less than 4,000 units for the automaker last year.

Toyota’s Chief Technology Officer, Hiroki Nakajima, even said that the company would be repurposing their investment in hydrogen fuel-cell tech after their flagship hydrogen FCV, the Mirai, was not “successful” during last year’s Tokyo motor show. (Ironically, Mirai is Japanese for “future.”)

Nakajima said that Toyota will instead focus on developing hydrogen FCVs for commercial use, like what Honda and GM currently do at their manufacturing plant in Brownstown, Michigan. However, unless hydrogen-fueling infrastructures significantly improve, it will not be likely that hydrogen FCVs will make up a significant percentage of the market, as Toyota recently predicted.