19 brands and their best-selling models

WHEN I was conducting research for this supplement on the Philippine auto industry’s sales performance in the first semester of the year, some brands declined to reveal their sales data, whether total sales or the number of units sold per model.

As expected, the luxury car segment was tight-lipped, except for four brands and France’s biggest automaker.

It was not because the premium brands feared attracting attention from the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

The reason given was that their principals in Europe and the United Kingdom have a policy of disclosing only global total sales, never total sales per country, region or market.

The brands that declined to divulge sales digits were Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Maserati, Porsche and Rolls-Royce.

Automobile Central Enterprise Inc., the distributor of Volkswagen, and Scandinavian Motors Corp., the distributor of Volvo, also begged off, but for another reason.

Fortunately, four premium brands— BMW, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and MINI Cooper—and the biggest car manufacturer in France, Peugeot, did come across.

So I ended up with 19 brands and their three best-selling models during the first half of 2016, listed below in the order of the one with the highest total sales as the first, down to the brand with the lowest total sales as the last.

Including the luxury brands with mass market brands may seem like mixing apples with oranges, but Inquirer Motoring wants to be as complete as possible.

Here goes: