Suzuki and Toyota crushing it in South Africa – beat Hyundai, VW, and Ford
A recent media sentiment report has revealed that Suzuki and its ally Toyota achieved the highest scores over the past year.
The report was conducted by Press Pulse, which uses AI to measure the overall sentiment of online media reports in South Africa.
It focuses on South African business reporting from top-tier media publications to measure how successfully companies achieve positive exposure.
Press Pulse does this by determining the tone of articles – if they are positive, neutral, or negative, and ranking them accordingly. It also takes the reach and influence of the publication into account.
For example, the more positive articles a company receives, the better its sentiment ranking will be. It also holds true for the inverse – more negative media coverage equals a worse ranking.
South Africa’s favourite car brands
We used Press Pulse to compare the rankings of South Africa’s most popular car brands in November 2025.
South Africa’s top five car brands in November were:
- Toyota – sold 13,576 units
- Suzuki – sold 6,385 units
- VW – sold 6,044 units
- Ford – sold 3,095 units
- Hyundai – sold 3,051 units
We ranked these brands by their media sentiment ratings over the whole of 2025 using Press Pulse, and Suzuki took the lead.
Here are the results:
Suzuki achieved a score of 128.13, more than double its next competitor. This shows that it enjoyed significantly more positive press coverage among top-tier business publications over 2025, compared with other car brands.
The Japanese carmaker has been crushing it in South Africa, achieving milestone after milestone.
It recently hit a new record of more than 35,000 vehicle purchases in South Africa for the 2025/2026 financial year, beating its previous record by more than 25%.
Suzuki’s partner Toyota, also a Japanese carmaker, dominates South Africa’s car industry and also took second place in the Press Pulse sentiment report, with a sentiment score of 62.71
The final car brand with a positive sentiment score was Hyundai, while VW and Ford received negative ratings.
Interestingly, Ford started the year in second place, but faced retrenchments and stiff competition locally.
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