Australia’s top-selling car brand Toyota has been named the country’s most-trusted again by Roy Morgan.

As CarAdvice reports, the market research company’s findings, which form part of its annual Risk Report, revealed the automotive industry to be the fifth-most trusted overall, with many of the biggest selling brands within it, perhaps unsurprisingly, occupying a space within the top 10 trustworthy brands.

After surveying over 7000 respondents during April 2020, Toyota and Mazda claimed the top two spots again as both did in 2019, while many other Japanese brands remained on the list, including Subaru which rose two places, and Honda and Nissan which both fell down the list slightly.

The Toyota HiLux was Australia’s best-selling ‘car’ overall yet again in 2019.

With Japan being the greatest source of new cars sold in Australia, and Toyota and Mazda the best and second-best selling brands overall last year, these results are all largely unsurprisingly.

However, Korean brands – which sell the third-highest number of new cars in Australia overall – saw their standings fall in this year’s rankings, with Hyundai dropping two places and Kia falling out of the top 10 completely.

Mercedes-Benz saw a big rise from eighth to fifth overall, but it wasn’t the most surprising rise as relative newcomer Tesla, only present in the Australian market since 2014 and only offering three of its four current models here, jumped from seventh all the way up to a podium third.

This comes despite Tesla’s Australian arm not reporting local sales figures to VFACTS at any point since its arrival here.

Mazda once again took out the silver medal for trustworthiness in Roy Morgan’s Risk Report. (Pictured: Mazda3 Hatch)

The other interesting inclusion in 10th place is ride-sharing service Uber, which managed to beat out BMW – a company that, along with Kia, has largely bucked the recent downward new car sales slide – which came in 11th overall. High-seller Mitsubishi, which occupied this place last year, saw its trustworthiness rating go down.

Worth noting, though, is that Uber’s inclusion is due to the survey including 35 major transport brands that includes not only car manufacturers and ride-sharing services, but also dealers, mechanical service chains, and suppliers of spare parts and tyres.

Across the board, however, Roy Morgan found that “more Australians trust brands in [the automotive] industry than distrust these brands,” with it noted that “only two car manufacturers are distrusted overall: Volkswagen and Holden, a response to the former’s emissions scandal and the latter’s closing of Australian facilities.”


Australia’s top 10 most trusted automotive brands

2020

  1. Toyota
  2. Mazda
  3. Tesla
  4. Honda
  5. Mercedes-Benz
  6. Subaru
  7. Nissan
  8. Hyundai
  9. Ford
  10. Uber
  11. BMW

2019

  1. Toyota
  2. Mazda
  3. Honda
  4. Subaru
  5. Nissan
  6. Hyundai
  7. Tesla
  8. Mercedes-Benz
  9. Kia
  10. Ford
  11. Mitsubishi
Patrick Jackson
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