Prius Gets Alpha Boost & Lafesta Soars in August Japan New Car Sales

Toyota’s Prius maintains its position at the head of Japan’s new car sales rankings in August, once again edging out Honda’s Fit.

Although Toyota will want to make much of the fact that the Prius also garnered more sales in August 2011 than at the same time last year, halting the year-on-year sales decline that has been continuing for the 12 months previous, the fact is that much of this gain has been due to the addition of belated deliveries of the minivan Prius Alpha.

Yes, that’s right: Even though the Prius Alpha is only loosely related to the regular Prius hybrid, the sales figures treat the Prius and Prius Alpha as a single model type. Which also explains Honda’s Fit maintaining its number two position. For it also has benefited from the addition of a model that is similar in name, although quite different in other respects – the Fit Shuttle.

Just why JADA insists on counting these quite different models as one is a mystery. Toyota gets to retain its bragging rights as top of the heap, but at the same time the interesting question as to how much the Prius Alpha is eating into standard Prius market share is obscured.

The biggest winner this month, though, is surely the Nissan Lafesta that has seen its sales revived a whopping 253% over the same month last year thanks to a much-needed update that I reported on a while back.

Here are the stats for regular passenger (non-kei cars):

Sources: JADA, Nikkei (Japanese)