Volkswagen is the UK’s highest-selling car brand… again
VW may top the charts but the Chinese are catching up with nearly 10 per cent of all new-car sales coming from their new-age brands
Volkswagen is the UK’s favourite car company in terms of outright sales for 2025, with the German brand selling a total of 178,599 units during the year, up nearly 7.4 per cent on its 2024 total. This comes despite having no single model with a top-five sales ranking, suggesting that customers from across the spectrum are showing the love for Volkswagen and its models.
Next up in the charts was BMW with 122,721 units sold, followed closely by Ford with 118,997, and Kia with 113,429 units. Each of these marques showed subtle swings compared with the 2024 totals, with BMW down two per cent, Kia up by one per cent and Ford up around 10 per cent.
However, take a look at the percentage changes from other brands and you’ll notice one particular trend, and that’s the increase in sales from domestic Chinese brands such as Jaecoo, Omoda and BYD. The percentage change year-to-date figures are heavily skewed, because the variety of new models from these brands continues to grow at a huge pace, but collectively 10.5 per cent of all the new cars we purchased in the UK last year came from a domestic Chinese brand.
The strongest of these was BYD with 51,422 units sold, while sister companies Jaecoo and Omoda sold a combined 48,178 units.
However, there are other big movers in 2025, including massive growth at Polestar with a 95 per cent increase in yearly sales, at 16,959 units. The A290 hatchback also drove Alpine's total sales up 369 per cent with 1,742 units sold.
Other movements of note include Stellantis cousins Peugeot and Citroen, which had contrasting fortunes. Peugeot sales were up 20 per cent, but Citroen dropped 31 per cent. However, the impressive new C5 Aircross and a full year of the new C3 should see this trend reversed in 2026.
Stalwarts Toyota and Tesla saw drops of 11 and 10 per cent respectively, the latter coming as something of a surprise considering the arrival of the refreshed Model 3 and Model Y. These two models continue to outsell their EV rivals by huge margins, but their sales growth has definitely stalled in the past 12 months.
Across all brands, a total of 2,020,373 units were registered in 2025 in the UK, which represented a 3.46 per cent increase over 2024. All is not lost for the European brands, but they’ll need to keep up their momentum in order to keep ahead of new Chinese alternatives.
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