Taiwan’s Automobile Sales by Segment in 2019 Increase 1.1% to 440,000 Units

Taiwan’s automobile market grew 1.1% year-on-year in 2019 to 440,000 units. With the market size remaining at around 440,000 units for the fourth consecutive year, the shift in demand from passenger cars to SUVs has become prominent in the structure of the market. Looking at sales data by vehicle type, 181,000 passenger cars such as sedans and hatchbacks, and 79,000 SUVs were sold in 2014, but in 2019 passenger car and SUV sales were about the same, each type a little over 124,000 units. More concretely, 124,402 passenger cars and 124,727 SUVs were sold in 2019, SUVs surpassing passenger cars for the first time.

Looking at passenger car sales, the volume-selling B and C segments declined in 2019 for the fifth consecutive year (combined total). The B segment fell 9.6% to 40,000 units. The Toyota Yaris increased 17.4% thanks to the addition of the crossover version Yaris Cross, returning to first place in the B segment. However, almost all other models fell below the previous year’s level, resulting in a nearly double-digit decline for the segment as a whole. The C segment dropped 4.1% to 73,000 units. Taiwan’s best-selling model the Toyota Corolla Altis, whose fully-redesigned version was released in March 2019, increased 9.9% to 31,000 units, going up for the first time in three years. The fully-redesigned Ford Focus, launched in February 2019, rose 2.4-fold to 11,000 units. Partly affected by these new-vehicle effects, the Nissan Tiida and Mazda3 each fell over 40%.