After 55 Years, Toyota Has Sold 50 Million Corollas
Photo: Toyota
Toyota is celebrating the 50th million Corolla, which rolled off an unspecified assembly line last month. Introduced in 1966 and now in its 12th generation, the Toyota Corolla is one of the bestselling vehicles in the United States and, since surpassing the Volkswagen Beetle in the 1990s, the world’s bestselling car of all time.
The Corolla has been around for 55 years but Toyota wasn’t always making it in the U.S. That started in the mid-1980s, though the car was already widely popular among Americans at the time, in part because of the 1973 oil embargo that pushed consumers toward more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Modernized: 2022 Toyota Corolla Sedan
Today, nearly every U.S.-built Corolla is assembled at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Mississippi, which opened in 2011. This year, the new Mazda Toyota Manufacturing plant in Huntsville, Alabama, also began building the all-new Toyota Corolla Cross.
In 2020, the 237,178 units of the sedan and hatchback models were sold, a decrease of 22 percent largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, that was good enough to make the Corolla the 11th bestselling vehicle in the country, and the third bestselling passenger car after the Honda Civic and the Toyota Camry.
Hot Tech: New Toyota models get next-gen multimedia system
Though passenger car sales have been steadily declining over the past decade as SUVs and light-duty pickup trucks continue to soar upward, Toyota is still committed to the Corolla. The all-new 2022 model is sportier and more efficient than ever, its hybrid powertrain earning an EPA-estimated 52 combined mpg. Every Corolla also comes with standard Toyota Safety Sense 2.0, one of the more advanced driver-assistive safety suites in the business.
“After 50 million cars, the Toyota Corolla heads into the future offering stylish, agile, quiet, roomy, highly efficient models brimming with the latest tech and safety and ready to write millions more personal stories around the globe,” the automaker writes. “Toyota invites everyone with a Corolla story to share it using #MyCorollaStory.”
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.