Best Selling Cars Around The Globe: Posh Tastes In Bangladesh

After spending some time in Israel, Botswana and Malta over the last few weeks, we are back in Asia this weekend to visit flooded Bangladesh.

If the sight of flooded streets is becoming too much for you, that’s okay, I have thought of you and prepared info about car sales in 155 additional countries that you can explore in my blog, so click away!

Now back to Bangladesh. With over 140 million inhabitants living in a country significantly smaller than Florida, you’d expect traffic jams to be commonplace, and they are indeed.

It’s just that the streets are not filled with the cars you’d expect from a country relatively similar to big neighbor India…

To rejig your memory let me just remind you that India is the kingdom of Maruti Suzuki with the Alto and Wagon R minis extremely successful. Hyundai with its i10 is also up there, and by and large the majority of cars sold in India are very small by international standard. To such an extent that what are called ‘small cars’ in the US are considered relatively luxurious cars in India: I’m talking Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic.

This is where the Bangladesh car landscape becomes really interesting.

And No there are no official sales figures that I could find online to establish the best-selling cars in Bangladesh so my old mate YouTube was once again very insightful here to help me come up with a rough ranking for you. However if you do have access to any official data about Bangladesh car sales you have to raise your hand and share the love ASAP!

You see, there are relatively high taxes imposed on Indian imports in Bangladesh and this means all the little Maruti Suzukis that pack the streets of Mumbai and Delhi do not find their way very easily into Bengali streets in spite of the proximity.

But no such thing for Japanese car imports.

The result is that (who else but) Toyota holds 80 percent of the Bengali market and should in all likelihood place the Corolla in pole position by far, a feat that would be absolutely impossible in India due to its high price there. Another element to take into account is that the Bengali car market is only just starting to blossom, with the car still an extravagance only reserved to the elite, therefore having a ‘luxury’ car on top of the sales ranking kind of makes sense.

The other Toyotas popular in Bangladesh are the Noah…

…Voxy…

and Allion.

Again this is not a foolproof estimation and is only based on observation of recent YouTube videos of the streets of the capital Dhaka, so if you have more precise information please ensure you get in touch.

Matt Gasnier, based in Sydney, Australia, runs a blog named Best Selling Cars, dedicated to counting cars all over the world.