Car and Motorcycle Brands in Thailand

New Passenger Cars on the Road 2016 :

Toyota and Honda are clearly the most sought after cars in Thailand. Other Japanese car brands do well. Lots of these cars are produced in Thailand locally. Ford and Chevrolet cars are present in the market, though Chevrolet sales have fallen back, compared to previous years.

In the mainstream car market, targeting middle- and low-income users, the European brands are conspicuous by their absence. Clearly there are no or few local dealers for these brands, explaining low sales. Imported cars face heavy duties, and when there are no local dealerships, where do you go for maintenance and repairs? About 65 Volkswagen cars sold in one year in Thailand, quite puzzling. It looks like European car manufacturers never considered Thailand as a base of production for car sales.

In the high-end and luxury car markets, the European brands are otherwise well presented, with the standard Mercedes Benz and BMWs having good sales, while some Italian fashion cars (Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini) can be found crawling on Bangkok's streets.

Most of the sales of these high-end cars (that also feature high import taxes) occur to customers living in Bangkok. See car sales for the year 2013 for comparison.

Overall, while (we estimate) about 1/6 of the population of Thailand, lives in Bangkok, the capital is worth half of the car sales in the country.

New cars on the road for 2016. Between brackets number of the previous year.

New Pick-Up Type Vehicles on the road, 2016.

Sales of pick-up trucks are dominated by Japanese owned companies, with most cars locally produced. Isuzu overtook Toyota in this year's list.

European brands are completely absent (Peugeot somehow sold 40 units) while Ford and Chevrolet have a stable, relevant presence.

There are two to three times as many pick-up vehicles sold in the provinces of Thailand, than in the capital Bangkok.
Numbers between brackets indicate sales last year (2015).

New Motorcycles on the road 2016.

About 1.74 million new motorcycles sold in 2016, the vast majority in the provinces (and there causing havoc on the roads). Honda is dominating the motorcycle market, with 80% of all sales. Some European presence here : especially the Italian brands have emerged the last few years (Vespa, Benelli, Ducati). Besides the Japanese motorcycles, there seems to be a wide assortment of locally or regionally made motorcycles, mostly with low sales, and with brand names I am not familiar with.

408 Harley Davidson sales, virtually all in Bangkok.

Source : Transport Statistics Sub-Division, Department of Land Transport