📋 Australia cars

Table of contents

🏆 Most popular vehicles in Australia (2025) 🏭 Where are they manufactured?

🧑 You

What's the most popular vehicles purchased in Australia and where do they get manufactured?

▶ Reasoning

The user is asking about the most popular vehicles purchased in Australia and where they're manufactured. Let me check m…

🤖 Assistant

I'll check my skills index first, then research this for you.

▶ Tool: read_file [path='~/Personal/skills/skill_index.md']

▶ Tool: web_search [query='most popular vehicles purchased in Australia 2025 sa]…

▶ Reasoning

Let me look at the skill index. The question is a general knowledge/web research question about most popular vehicles in…

🤖 Assistant

Let me pull the data from a couple of these sources.

▶ Tool: fetch_url [url='https://carsauce.com/news/top-10-best-selling-cars-in-]…

▶ Tool: fetch_url [url='https://www.drive.com.au/news/australias-best-selling-]…

▶ Reasoning

I have great data on the most popular vehicles in Australia for 2025. Now I need to address the second part: where they …

🤖 Assistant

Here's the picture for the Australian new-car market, based on 2025 VFACTS sales data.

🏆 Most popular vehicles in Australia (2025)

Australia's market (1.24 million cars sold in 2025) is dominated by utes (pickups) and SUVs. The national top 10:

#	Model	2025 Sales	Made in
1	Ford Ranger (ute)	56,555	🇹🇭 Thailand (Rayong)
2	Toyota RAV4 (SUV)	51,947	🇯🇵 Japan / 🇨🇦 Canada / 🇺🇸 USA
3	Toyota HiLux (ute)	51,297	🇹🇭 Thailand
4	Isuzu D-Max (ute)	26,839	🇹🇭 Thailand
5	Ford Everest (SUV)	26,161	🇹🇭 Thailand
6	Toyota Prado (SUV)	26,106	🇯🇵 Japan (Tahara)
7	Hyundai Kona (SUV)	22,769	🇰🇷 Korea / 🇨🇿 Czech
8	Mazda CX-5 (SUV)	22,742	🇯🇵 Japan (Hiroshima)
9	Mitsubishi Outlander (SUV)	22,459	🇯🇵 Japan (Okazaki)
10	Tesla Model Y (EV)	22,239	🇨🇳 China (Shanghai) / 🇩🇪 Germany

A few notable takeaways:

• Toyota is the dominant brand overall — nearly 20% of every new car sold in Australia wears a Toyota badge, and it won outright in most states/territories.
• The HiLux has been Queensland's and the Northern Territory's favourite for 19 and 25 consecutive years respectively; the Ranger leads in Victoria, Tasmania, and nationally.
• The top 8 are all utes or SUVs — traditional passenger cars are now very much the minority.

🏭 Where are they manufactured?

This is the interesting part: Australia no longer manufactures cars locally (local production ended in 2017 when Holden/Ford/Toyota closed their plants), so virtually every new car sold is imported.

For the top sellers, Thailand is the single most important manufacturing hub — it builds the #1 Ranger, the #3 HiLux, and the D-Max and Everest, thanks largely to free-trade agreements that make Thai-built utes especially cheap to import. The broader picture from the 2025 source-country data reinforces this:

• 🇯🇵 Japan = #1 source country
• 🇹🇭 Thailand = #2 (utes)
• 🇨🇳 China = #3, and rising fast — now ~18% of all sales. Chinese brands (BYD, Chery, GWM, MG) are the market's biggest growth story; BYD grew 156% and Chery 177% in 2025.

Want me to go deeper on any particular model's exact plant, or break down EV/budget-brand growth trends?