Audi Leads Import Car Sales Growth in Japan

Despite the doom and gloom of the new car sales figures in the Japanese market, there is another more positive story developing and that is the increasing growth of the non-Japanese car brands in the Japanese market.

The leaders are the German marques, Audi, BMW and VW. In fact, Audi has had its best March ever in Japan with growth of 1.9% in sales, at the same time that other major makers have been reeling from the effects of the earthquake and tsunami disaster. New models in the A8 range launched in December 2010 and the A1 range in January this year have been the major driving forces in this growth.

Whereas sales of cars such as the Prius have been artificially buoyed by the Japanese government’s EcoCar incentive program, foreign marques were not able to take advantage of this as most of their cars failed to meet this scheme’s requirements. On the other hand, they have also not suffered the collapse in sales that occurred when this scheme ended.

Overall, sales of foreign brand cars are up 9.7% over the last year in Japan with a total number of cars sold reaching 182,829. On the other hand, to put this in perspective, this is still about 100,000 units less than the sales of Japan’s most popular model, the Toyota Prius.

Sources: TBS News, Response, Response (all Japanese-language)