So Much For Dieselgate: Outselling Toyota, Volkswagen Is World’s Largest Automaker In First 4 Months

With many journalists assuming that Volkswagen AG’s sales would drown in the wake of dieselgate, going under along with the company’s sullied reputation, swaths of the world media succumbed to a serious case of confirmation bias. Quite the opposite is true: Volkswagen stands every chance to fulfill its biggest corporation-wide dream: VW might finish the year as the world’s largest automaker. Today, Toyota, which has held the crown for the last four years, published its global sales and production data for April. For the first four months of the year, the Japanese automaker finds itself some 90,000 units behind Volkswagen. More tellingly, Toyota is on a protracted downward trend. Compared to the same period of last year, the company’s deliveries are down 2.8%. In 2015, the January-April number was 2.9% below that of the previous year.