Vw overtakes Toyota to become the world’s largest car manufacturer

Based on the latest set of production figures, Volkswagen has taken over Toyota’s place as the world’s largest carmaker. This report quoted the figures from industry analysts at Global Insight. In the first nine months of 2009, the VW Group manufactured 4.4 million units to Toyota’s 4.0 million. Coming in third place is Ford with 3.7 million units produced while General Motors takes the fourth place with 3.6 million units.

Not even VW saw this coming since under VW’s group strategy, it predicted that it would be the world’s largest manufacturer by 2018. This runaway success stemmed from the pan-European scrappage schemes that favored VW.

Western European car sales have been rising all year, with Germany seeing the greatest gains. Even with the scrappage scheme ending in September, registrations still grew by 26.1% in October. In the first nine months of the year, VW Group’s sales were up 34% to 622,853 units. Much of its success could be attributed to the launch of new Golf and Polo models, which recorded increases of 54.1% and 56.2% respectively.