Having published the top 10 car manufacturers for 2023 in Autocade Year of Cars 2025, I felt our readers deserved the 2024 table, and put it on the Autocade World website. There was only one public source that had them at that time: a website called Focus2move, and they seemed to be credible. The page has changed since, but if you go back to February in the Wayback Machine, you may find what we cited. Naturally, we linked to them as the source. These were the figures from Focus2move that we cited on Autocade World:
Except, from what I can tell, they’re wrong.
I had joked about Google AI Overview hallucinating its figures: it gave two sets within minutes on different browsers that were wrong, too. Note that Google does not provide a source for the first one:
Then you have things like this floating around, also wrong:
My first suspicion were the 2025 Q3 figures that Focus2move gave, as they weren’t correct. They actually put these behind a paywall but the ranking didn’t match up with our own.
Focus2move currently claims, ‘This report is produced by extracting the registrations figures from the Global Database owned by our team, which tracks registrations in 159 countries, all brands, and all models.’ This statement wasn’t there back in February, but, in any case, it sounds very authoritative.
I can’t confirm if this methodology accounts for the differences, but here are the real figures for 2024. You can see the proper version—for free—at Autocade World, where this screenshot comes from. These figures can all be confirmed with the manufacturers’ annual reports.
These do beg the question that if Focus2move is tracking 159 countries, and there are more countries in the world, then why are some of their figures higher than the ones we found?
And how much does Focus2move want for you to get behind the paywall?
Only €750.
Caveat emptor, because you cannot trust anything on the web these days, not even something simple like car manufacturer sales. We took over an hour to compile ours from annual reports, and as these are publicly traded companies, they need to be accurate. The exceptions to the sales’ figures are stated in Autocade World so you know we aren’t BSing you. It’s very disappointing, but as Statista (the source of our 2023 figures) and OICA (which has figures going back many years) didn’t have the latest, it seems the only way is to do it yourself or sign up to a professional service like JATO Dynamics, which is far more credible. I don’t know what they charge but if you can afford €750, you can afford them.
To think we almost committed the 2024 Focus2move figures to print for the next edition of Autocade Year of Cars. Naturally, we checked the minute we believed something was awry—which goes back to what I said about printed matter being that much more credible, generally. The internet is about as a reliable as a pub chat now, and the price of real knowledge is going up again.
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