Ever wondered how much money car manufacturers make? Well, motor trade insurer Staveley Head has done the maths and worked out the profits of 15 carmakers down to the second.
The sums start with each manufacturer’s yearly takings and profits. Then, all that’s needed is some very long-winded division based on those numbers.
For example, it means taking Toyota’s £13.5 billion profit over the previous 12 months and dividing it by 31,536,000 (the number of seconds in a year). The result is Toyota’s per-second profit for the past year: £430.
How much do they make?
Toyota comes top, but rivals don’t fare so well. Ford made an average of £173 profit in a second, while Volkswagen is down at just £91.
Premium brand Mercedes-Benz seems to have had an excellent 12 months, with £255 made every second on average. That’s over twice the amount of Porsche.
Jaguar Land Rover is down at £46 per second – and Bentley, Ferrari, Seat, Aston Martin, Renault, Hyundai, Bentley and Skoda are all included in the tool above, too.
How many they’re selling
Units sold is a very different thing to profit, of course, but still very interesting. Over the course of two minutes, Toyota sold 34 cars, Mercedes nine and Porsche just one. All of a sudden Porsche’s lower profit-per-second number doesn’t look so bad, given they sell one car for every nine Mercedes…
VW and Ford aren’t too far behind Toyota, with 24 and 25 cars shifted every two minutes respectively. JLR manages just two.
Per-unit profit is perhaps the biggest indicator of success, though. On each car sold, JLR made an average £2,774. Porsche, on the other hand, made £13,757.
Is this a reliable source?
There are a lot of averages and aggregates incorporated here. It’s not a live feed of what each carmaker is selling and earning, rather a year’s information divided over various measurements of time. Still, it’s an interesting way to take it all in.