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Toyota predicts ‘big second half’
Nathan Ponchard
2026-07-06
DESPITE its Australian sales having fallen by 21.4 per cent during the first half of this year, Toyota is now confident it will achieve 230,000 annual sales by December 31 courtesy of significant increases in vehicle supply.
Having revised sales projections from 200K to 210K in April, and again to 220K in June, the latest forecast includes an extra 10,000 cars and utes secured in June to satisfy demand for the RAV4, HiLux, Corolla Cross and updated bZ4X, on the back of 10,000 extra vehicles secured the previous month in a response to demand.
“In the last 30 days, we’ve been able to secure an additional 10,000 cars to make it to 230,000,” Toyota Australia vice president sales, marketing and franchise operations John Pappas told GoAuto at a recent media event in Queensland.
“If you look at our run rate in VFACTS at the moment, our first quarter’s been down – a lot.
“We knew that at the end of last year because we had HiLux in runout. We originally tried to land the new RAV4 last year, and we actually launched it in April this year, so we’ve missed a whole quarter of new RAV4 sales. So that’s predominantly where we’ve had a big impact on our volume versus the previous year,” he said.
“In order to get us to 230 (thousand), based on our run rate till June, or at least May, we’re going to have a big second half. But we’re up for it.
“We’ve got a very big, large team focused on making sure we can deliver all the vehicles from a logistics point of view, and our deal is prepping all our dealers to be able to deliver.
“The whole benefit goes back to the customer to reduce the lead time, because now we’ll bring our average lead time across our portfolio between three to six months, which is good news,” said Mr Pappas.
Given Toyota’s tally to the end of June was just 95,141 units (down from 120,978 during the same period of 2025), the company must deliver an average of almost 22,500 units per month for the remainder of 2026, which is a huge task.
Mr Pappas said the delay in the changeover between old and new RAV4 generations undoubtedly hindered Toyota’s sales potential.
“We’ll be doing over 40,000 (new-gen) RAV4s this year, and we haven’t actually had the car for a full year. The vehicle was developed to be launched (in the) third quarter last year … but a quality issue was identified, and we had to delay launch for over six months – quality and safety over everything else – which pushed it into this year.
“So we’ve had like a nine-month sales opportunity and we’ll do over 40,000 (deliveries), so (that’s) healthy demand,” said Mr Pappas.
In 2025, the RAV4 was Australia’s second best-selling model (and highest-selling Toyota) with 51,947 sales.
As for whether buyer reception to the heavily restyled (but not all-new) 2026 HiLux has hampered its sales, Mr Pappas said the ute “is going very well for us overall – we’ll do over 50,000 Hiluxes again (this year)”.
“We had a very strong run-out of the previous generation, so our ramp up in the first quarter of HiLux – because we didn’t get a full year’s sales rate of the (new) HiLux – we’re down on that versus previous year. But we’ll pick up a lot of that in the second half of the year,” he said.
The HiLux finished 2025 with 51,297 sales, Australia’s third most-popular vehicle after the Ford Ranger and RAV4. It climbed to second place (behind the Ranger) in the first half of this year, with the Tesla Model Y ahead of the fourth-placed RAV4.
Toyota Australia is also bullish about updated bZ4X sales. Now that both electric range and power output have been considerably enhanced for MY26 plus a new wagon variant called bZ4X Touring, the sales forecast for Toyota Australia’s first battery electric vehicle is 5000 units in 2026 – a massive lift over the 1041 units it achieved in 2025 and 977 units in 2024.
As for what new models to expect in the future, all Toyota Australia is communicating is the arrival of the all-new C-HR BEV in mid-2027 – a year behind its Subaru Uncharted twin due to global production schedules at the Takaoka plant in Japan, which Mr Pappas said cannot be brought forward – and the HiLux hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) in 2028.
In April, Toyota unveiled a facelifted Yaris Cross in Europe with new front-end styling, new wheels, new colours and revised interior materials, though there has been no confirmation that the changes made to this French-built, European-market vehicle will migrate to the Japanese-built version sold in Australia and New Zealand.
If Toyota Australia does manage to reach its 230,000 sales goal in 2026, it will still fall slightly behind its 2025 total of 239,863 units, which was Toyota’s second-highest Australian sales result on record.