Holden Commodore to Ford Ranger – Australia’s best sellers over the years

The Holden Commodore was the best-selling car in Australia from 1998 to 2010. After passing that honor on to Mazda, then eventually Toyota and now Ford, the once-iconic Australian car brand never recovered.

In 2015, the Toyota Corolla was Australia’s best-selling car with 42,073 deliveries, representing 3.64 percent of the total market of 1,155,408 vehicles. From there, the baton was passed to the Toyota HiLux, which became the annual leader for seven consecutive years (2016-2022). Then, the Ford Ranger took over the position of the country’s best seller in 2023 and also maintained the top spot in 2024 and 2025.

This “winners list” is short, but the underlying sales volumes are not. The HiLux’s peak year in this data set was 2022, when it found 64,391 new homes and accounted for 5.95 percent of the total market. The Ranger era is also strong, even as overall competition and model variety increases. The Ranger ended 2025 with 56,555 deliveries, or 4.56 percent of the total market of 1,241,037, at a time when there have never been so many vehicles for sale in Australia.

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Between 2015 and 2025, annual bestsellers increased from 42,073 to 56,555 deliveries, an increase of 14,482 vehicles. This is an important little side note, because despite more competition, more brands and more models, the overall market grew significantly less in the same period, from 1,155,408 to 1,241,037. The market share of the best-selling model is therefore a useful signal. It rose from 3.64 percent in 2015 to a peak of 5.95 percent in 2022 before settling back down to 4.56 percent in 2025.

This pattern fits well with the overall change, as the popularity of passenger cars declined dramatically over the decade while SUVs and light commercial vehicles increased. The best-selling story is simply this change, expressed in a single position: first a mainstream passenger plate (Corolla), then a ute (HiLux), then another ute (Ranger) that better fits the demand and product dynamics in the 2020s.

The change is not just in who wins, but also in what the top 10 looks like at the beginning and end of the data set.

In 2015, the top 10 list was full of household passenger car nameplates: Corolla was at the top, followed by Mazda3, with Hyundai i30, Commodore and Toyota Camry also in the 10. Utes were present (HiLux, Ranger, Mitsubishi Triton) and an SUV (the Mazda CX-5) also appeared, but the “focus” was still on passenger cars.