Toyota leads the car industry: what the data shows

Toyota and Honda are challenging the parts shortage in the industry with rising production in February.

The outage of parts continued to affect the overall production of Japanese carmakers for February, but the published results showed a clear contrast between them, with Toyota and Honda in the lead.

Toyota said its group, including Daihatsu and Hino Motors, produced 884,528 vehicles globally this month, up nearly 11% from a month earlier a year ago. The group also produced a record number of vehicles for February in markets outside Japan, despite the lack of parts triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Honda also said its overall production in February increased by 8.1% to 344,712 vehicles.

Toyota alone has surpassed its February global production target, launched a month earlier, by nearly 41,000 vehicles. However, the level of production was lower than a year ago, due to the lack of supply of parts induced by COVID-19 in North America and the reduced supply of parts in Europe, due to increasing demand.

Toyota is ahead of the competition

While the automaker was also facing narrow semiconductor deliveries in China, the company said it used chips that had become surplus since the plant closed in January due to COVID-19 to mitigate this.

Although the semiconductor shortage and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and lowered production levels compared to February last year in Europe and North America, the problem was not severe in Asia, where production levels increased over the same period. last year.

But in contrast, Nissan said its overall production for February fell by 7.8% from 275,437 units last year due to a shortage of semiconductors.

Subaru’s overall production in February fell by 24% over the same period to 47,625. The company said it has adjusted and suspended operation due to the tight supply of parts using semiconductors.