For the first time since the early 1930s, General Motors cannot call itself the world’s largest automaker. Its sales fell behind Toyota in 2008, a year when G.M. celebrated its 100th anniversary and narrowly avoided a bankruptcy filing amid a significant downturn in the economy.
G.M. said on Wednesday that it sold 8.35 million vehicles in 2008, about 620,000 fewer than Toyota’s 8.97 million. G.M.’s sales were down 11 percent from 2007, while Toyota’s declined 4 percent.
G.M. had been the largest carmaker since it overtook Ford in 1931, two years before Toyota began making cars in Japan. Toyota had been closing in on G.M. for years; its sales surged around the world while G.M.’s global expansion was tempered by decades of falling market share in the United States. The two had traded places from one quarter to the next in recent years. G.M. had been widely expected to slip into second place in 2007 but held off Toyota by about 3,000 vehicles.
In 2008, 64 percent of G.M.’s sales occurred outside the United States, up from 59 percent the previous year. It still outsells Toyota in the United States by a wide margin — nearly 800,000 vehicles in 2008, or 33 percent more than Toyota — but Toyota sells more in the rest of the world.
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