10 most popular cars in Canada, leading sales in 2022 (2024)

Pick your word. Turmoil? Turbulent? Troublesome? If you’re looking for the proper language to describe the Canadian auto industry’s most recent three-year span, there’s no shortage of options. However, one thing is for sure, cars are still popular in Canada, even if the sales aren’t stable.

Article content

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a profitable period for automakers and their dealer representatives. Even in 2022, with auto sales falling to the lowest level since The Great Recession of 2009 (a little more than 1.5 million units, down from the 10-year average of 1.83 million) average transaction prices remained extraordinarily high with limited incentives and significant profit margins.

Remember that in 2017, when Canadian auto sales topped 2 million vehicles for the first time ever, the average incentive on a new vehicle reached $6,000.

In the third-quarter of 2022, meanwhile, the average transaction price (ATP) for new vehicles in Canada was a record $57,519, $24,000 higher than in 2017. One key difference: new vehicle incentives have all but dried up. So while automakers are now combining to sell around 28,000 fewer vehicles per month than has become the norm, they’re doing so in an entirely different price stratosphere.

Article content

Put another way, the pickup trucks that account for nearly one-quarter of new vehicles sold in Canada – and dominate this list of Canada’s best-selling vehicles – now transact at an ATP of $69,790.

Just how dominant are trucks on the list of Canada’s most popular vehicles in 2022? Four of the five leaders are full-size trucks, leaving space for three passenger cars and three crossovers.

10. Hyundai Elantra: 24,559, down 7 percent

The Hyundai Elantra’s third-place finish among passenger cars marked the fifth consecutive year with a passenger car bronze medal for Hyundai’s compact. Compared with key car rivals, the Elantra’s 7-percent year-over-year decline was modest. The Elantra is one of only three cars in the top 10; one of only six in the top 40.

Article content

9. Hyundai Kona: 24,579, down 21 percent

Easily Canada’s most popular and best-selling subcompact utility vehicle, the Kona also ranks as Canada’s highest-volume Hyundai, Canada’s third-ranked SUV/crossover, and the ninth-best-selling vehicle overall. 2021’s Kona output of 31,101 units represents the high-water mark for the Kona in Canada. One rung up the ladder, Hyundai’s Tucson was Canada’s 14th-ranked vehicle in 2022.

8. Honda Civic: 29,722, down 32 percent

Until availability improves, we won’t be able to determine the degree to which the entry-level 11th-generation Honda Civic’s lofty base price – $28,759, 12 percent more than its better-selling rival’s base sticker – is limiting sales. For the time being, the Civic is inventory-limited rather than demand-limited. Regardless of the reason, for the first time since 1997, the Civic isn’t Canada’s top-selling car.

Article content

7. Honda CR-V: 32,096, down 37 percent

With the long-awaited arrival of an all-new Honda CR-V for the 2023 model year during the latter portion of 2022, Honda Canada finally found some positive sales news. Fourth-quarter CR-V volume jumped 8 percent. Over the course of 12 months, however, the CR-V’s year-over-year decline was worse than any of the 55 best-selling vehicles in the country.

6. Toyota Corolla: 33,906, down 15 percent

For the first time in its history, this long-time global top seller is Canada’s best-selling car. The Toyota Corolla didn’t have a good year, not by Corolla standards. Over the previous half-decade, Toyota averaged 44,000 annual Corolla sales. But by the standards of its passenger car competitors, only two of which topped the 15,000-unit mark, the Corolla is a dominant force in Canada.

Article content

5. GMC Sierra: 52,318, down 3 percent

It’s not the most consequential headline, but it remains decidedly unusual: the GMC Sierra was outsold by the Chevrolet Silverado in Canada in 2022. It’s a common result south of the border, where GM’s product positioning carves out a distinctly dominant position for the twin trucks. In Canada, however, the Sierra has been more popular than the Silverado in each of the last 13 years.

4. Chevrolet Silverado: 53,281, up 3 percent

More important than the fact that the Chevrolet Silverado outsold its virtually identical twin in 2022 for the first time since 2008 is the fact that General Motors sold 118,195 total pickup trucks across four model lines in Canada in 2022. In other words, still not enough for GM to sell more pickups than Ford, which pumped out 125,919 pickups over the last 12 months.

Article content

3. Toyota RAV4: 55,921, down 10 percent

Toyota’s top seller first wore Canada’s SUV crown in 2016, making 2022 the seventh consecutive year of RAV4 sales leadership in the utility vehicle sector. Although RAV4 sales dipped in 2022 on the whole, the fourth-quarter told a very different story. Combined October, November, and December sales were 48-percent stronger this year than last, a 4,326-unit improvement. Toyota sold 13,432 RAV4s in Q4. Its next-best-selling rival, the Honda CR-V, produced 14,587 sales in the entire second-half.

2. Ram P/U: 75,740, up 3 percent

Claiming precisely one-quarter of all full-size pickup truck sales, the Ram pickup truck wasn’t just a momentous player in the big truck arena, it’s a major component for the automaker, as well. Just under half of all sales at Stellantis (Ram, Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler) are full-size trucks with the Ram 1500 dominating. Among Canada’s 40 best-selling vehicles, two others hail from Ram’s parent company: the 11th-ranked Jeep Wrangler and 16th-ranked Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Article content

1. Ford F-Series: 114,729, down 1 percent

Ford’s full-size pickup truck market share dropped by a point (to 37.3 percent) in 2022, but the F-Series still easily held on as Canada’s top truck for a 57th consecutive year. As far as the overall vehicle sales race goes, no other vehicle line in Canada has ever topped the 100K mark – the F-Series has done so in 11 consecutive years. The Ford F-150 and its heavy duty siblings claimed the No. 1 spot from the Honda Civic in 2009 and hasn’t let go since.

Sign up for our newsletter Blind-Spot Monitor and follow our social channels on Instagram ,Facebook and X to stay up to date on the latest automotive news, reviews, car culture, and vehicle shopping advice.