At Toyota, the crisis in the auto industry has not triggered a bad weather warning. Even if the epidemic recovery which is hitting some subcontractors in Vietnam, Burma and Thailand has been disrupting production since August, the current year will allow the Japanese firm to beat its market share records. In Europe, the manufacturer, which achieved 3% of sales in 2000, 4% in 2010 and 5% in 2020, has made a leap that will lead it to cross the 6% mark this year. In France, which has become its main outlet on the continent, commercial results are stable while total registrations have plummeted by 23% since the start of the year. The brand now weighs 6% of new cars, a point and a half gained in two years.
The planets have aligned to allow the world’s largest manufacturer to ride against the tide of the auto crisis. Hit hard by the 2011 tsunami, which permanently disrupted its production, Toyota has rethought its industrial organization. In order to better manage its supplies in the medium term, the manufacturer has approached all of its subcontractors, often Japanese, and has relaxed its culture of “Zero stock”. This ability to anticipate allowed it to be less penalized than its competitors when the semiconductor shortage arose.
A more consensual style
The intensification of CO hunting2 is a godsend for this pioneer and leader in hybrid technology combining a heat engine and an electric. According to the automotive consulting firm Inovev, the models “ full hybrid “(Excluding “Micro hybrids” and plug-in hybrids), in other words the great house specialty, grew by 68% during the first half of the year in Europe to total more than 322,000 units (5.4% of the market). Toyota and Lexus, its premium brand, have won three-quarters of this set, far ahead of Renault and Hyundai-Kia.
The sales curve also benefited from the success of the new generation of the Yaris, a small urban vehicle voted Car of the Year 2021, and the launch of the Yaris Cross, a small SUV that will finally open up a particularly dynamic segment for the brand. . These two models, manufactured in the Onnaing factory, near Valenciennes (North), meet strong demand and mark a turning point, in particular by adopting a more consensual style than the previous ones.
With its certainties, the manufacturer has reassessed its commercial forecasts in Europe for 2021, bringing them from 1.1 to 1.2 million units. “We are capable of maintaining and why not consolidating our lead”, says Andrea Carlucci, head of product and marketing at Toyota-Europe, convinced that he is reaping the benefits of a long-standing strategy. According to him, “The hybrid will remain a central technology because the future of all-electric depends on elements that escape manufacturers, such as the creation of a sufficiently dense network of recharges but also the evolution of performance as the cost of batteries”.
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