Toyota Rejects Ford Claim About the World’s Best-Selling Car

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) announced that the Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) claim that its Focus was the best-selling car in the world last year is false. This sets up a battle over how the statistics are taken. Toyota used research firm Polk. Maybe Polk’s numbers got its wrong. According to Reuters:

Toyota Motor Corp said on Wednesday its Corolla was the world’s top selling car of 2012, contradicting rival Ford (F.N) which claimed top spot for its Focus model.

Ford said on Tuesday it sold 1.02 million Focus compact cars last year, citing data from automotive consulting firm Polk.

It did not detail Corolla sales in a press release on its website, but various media reports have cited the U.S. carmaker as saying Toyota sold 872,774 Corollas last year.

Toyota’s Tokyo-based spokesman Ryo Sakai said the Japanese carmaker sold 1.16 million Corollas in 2012 and that “Toyota still sees the Corolla as the world’s most popular car”.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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