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.
By 2025, the list of top 10 sellers reads like a modern Australian mix of driveway and construction site. The top three are Ranger (56,555), Toyota RAV4 (51,947) and HiLux (51,297). This is followed by a stack of large-volume SUVs and small cars: Isuzu D-Max, Ford Everest, Toyota Prado, Hyundai Kona, Mazda CX-5 and Mitsubishi Outlander. The tenth-placed model in 2025 also marks the new era: the Tesla Model Y with 22,239 deliveries, which corresponds to a share of 1.79% of the overall market.
Another “health check” for the market shape is the ticket to the top 10. The Volkswagen Golf was in 10th place in 2015 with 22,092 sales. In 2025, the Model Y electric SUV ranked 10th with 22,239. Despite huge changes in segment mix and brand competition, the top 10 cutoff was in a similar place at the beginning and end of the period (it fell in 2020 during the market downturn, when the Hyundai Tucson was in 10th place with 15,789).
If you look at the entire period 2015-2025, you won’t just see which models come out on top each year. It’s also about which vehicles have become the consistent leaders in the market.
Across all 11 years in the sales data presented here, the cumulative top sellers are the HiLux (551,987) and the Ranger (513,186), followed by the RAV4 (354,888) and the Corolla (328,459). This cumulative ranking reinforces the narrative: vans and SUVs now form the basis of Australia’s high-volume reality, while the remaining front-runners in passenger vehicles are the exception rather than the rule.
Cumulative Top 10 Nameplate Sales, 2015-2025:
| rank | nameplate | Cumulative revenue (2015-2025) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Toyota Hilux | 551,987 |
| 2 | Ford Ranger | 513,186 |
| 3 | Toyota RAV4 | 354,888 |
| 4 | Toyota Corolla | 328,459 |
| 5 | Mazda CX-5 | 269,912 |
| 6 | Hyundai i30 | 266,895 |
| 7 | Mitsubishi Triton | 239,977 |
| 8 | Isuzu Ute D-Max | 236,908 |
| 9 | Mazda3 | 231,771 |
| 10 | Toyota Prado | 199,908 |
Australia’s best-selling cars from 1998 to 2025:
| Year | Create model | Sales |
|---|---|---|
| 1998 | Holden Commodore | 94,635 |
| 1999 | Holden Commodore | 85,648 |
| 2000 | Holden Commodore | 83,610 |
| 2001 | Holden Commodore | 85,422 |
| 2002 | Holden Commodore | 88,478 |
| 2003 | Holden Commodore | 86,553 |
| 2004 | Holden Commodore | 79,170 |
| 2005 | Holden Commodore | 66,794 |
| 2006 | Holden Commodore | 56,531 |
| 2007 | Holden Commodore | 57,307 |
| 2008 | Holden Commodore | 51,093 |
| 2009 | Holden Commodore | 44,387 |
| 2010 | Holden Commodore | 45,956 |
| 2011 | Mazda3 | 41,429 |
| 2012 | Mazda3 | 44,128 |
| 2013 | Toyota Corolla | 43,498 |
| 2014 | Toyota Corolla | 43,735 |
| 2015 | Toyota Corolla | 42,073 |
| 2016 | Toyota Hilux | 42,104 |
| 2017 | Toyota Hilux | 47,093 |
| 2018 | Toyota Hilux | 51,705 |
| 2019 | Toyota Hilux | 47,649 |
| 2020 | Toyota Hilux | 45,176 |
| 2021 | Toyota Hilux | 52,801 |
| 2022 | Toyota Hilux | 64,391 |
| 2023 | Ford Ranger | 63,356 |
| 2024 | Ford Ranger | 62,593 |
| 2025 | Ford Ranger | 56,555 |




