THE SUV AMERICANS FELL IN LOVE WITH IN 2024

With the 2024 automotive sales year wrapped up, you're seeing the usual suspects at the top of the list, with the Ford F-Series taking first place, at 765,649 units sold, the Chevrolet Silverado in second, at 549,945, and, in third, the Toyota RAV4, with 475,193 units sold, making it the top-selling vehicle in America that's not a truck. The top three for 2024 look the same as it did in 2023, and while it may be no surprise to learn that America fell in love with the RAV4 all over again in 2024, it is worth noting that the RAV4 actually saw a 9.3% sales boost over the previous year, so this is a love affair that's only getting stronger, despite this RAV4 generation now entering its seventh model year.

Now that the dust has settled, and we can observe the broader trends for auto sales in 2024 from a safe distance, what does the Toyota RAV4's continued dominance of its segment tell us?

The RAV4 Tops The Best-Selling SUVs In 2024

Let's take a look at the top five selling SUVs for 2025:

One of the first things you'll notice about these numbers is that the Toyota RAV4 and the Honda CR-V were the only top-selling SUVs that actually saw an increase in sales over 2023. The Tesla Model Y took the biggest hit, losing 18.71% in sales, the Jeep Grand Cherokee took the second-biggest loss, at -11.63%, and the Nissan Rogue's -9.48% loss feels like a symptom of a larger issue with Nissan losing ground across the board as it struggles to keep its head above water.

At a sales bump of 11.44%, the Honda CR-V actually saw a greater increase in sales than the RAV4, but Toyota still managed to put a margin of nearly 75,000 units between them, comfortably retaining the lead.

How The Fifth-Gen RAV4 Stays Fresh

The 2024 Toyota RAV4 dates back to 2018, when it launched for the 2019 model year. One would expect the SUV to be feeling its age by this point, resulting in dwindling sales. The opposite has been true for the RAV4, thanks to Toyota's repeated updates to keep the vehicle fresh over six model years.

The 2019 model year saw the debut of the RAV4 PHEV, initially sold in the US as the RAV4 Prime, with the latest iteration boasting 302 horsepower and a 0-60 time of 5.5 seconds, proving that plug-in SUVs don't have to be dull. In 2021, Toyota gave the RAV4 a facelift with new LED projector-type headlights, new alloy wheels, and some extra charging ports.

In addition to these more dramatic updates to the lineup, the RAV4 also sees the usual round of smaller annual updates year after year. Changes to the 2024 RAV4 include:

• New Ice Cap exterior color option
• Army Green exterior color option, exclusive to the Adventure, TRD Off-Road, and Woodland Edition trims
• A standard wireless charging pad
• New Hybrid Woodland Edition with TRD-tuned suspension
• New Weather Package option for Woodland Edition, with heated front seats and steering wheel, and rain-sensing wipers

For the most part, the RAV4 sees fairly minor-to-moderate tweaks from year to year, but Toyota doles them out at a steady pace, so there's always a reason to buy the new RAV4 rather than shopping around for a model from a couple years ago to save a few bucks. This has kept the fifth-gen RAV4 feeling fresh long after the point where its competitors started to feel out of date.

What Can We Expect From The Sixth-Gen RAV4?

Toyota has been playing its cards close to its chest when it comes to revealing details about the next generation RAV4. Andrew Gilleland, Toyota North America's Head of Automotive Operations told Automotive News last year that the RAV4 is "a reminder that that's where the industry is at in terms of what people want: small SUVs that are fuel efficient," reflecting on how the RAV4 has overtaken the Camry as Toyota's flagship model over the last ten years or so. Gilleland attributed some of the SUV's success to "hitting the market with the right product at the right time," and that's a hard case to argue with.

With that in mind, it's difficult to imagine Toyota wanting to rock the boat too much. But, the 2025 Toyota Camry being hybrid-only doesn't seem to have harmed sales any. The Camry remained the best-selling car in the US for 2024 after a brace of trucks and SUVs, with 309,875 sales, a 6.61% bump over the previous year's 290,649, so going plug-in-only with the next-gen RAV4 might not be as bold a leap as it seems. Battery-powered vehicles of all types still make up a relatively small minority of overall auto sales in the US, but those numbers are steadily growing. The RAV4 PHEV saw an impressive 19.3% sales increase for 2024, while the HEV saw a 29.3% sales increase. In this respect, the US still lags far behind countries such as Norway and China, where EVs have a market share of about 89% and 47%, respectively.

On the other hand, Cooper Erickson, Toyota's head of product planning, said that the idea is to give customers more of what they want, stating "We could sell 500,000 of those things a year if we could build them, so we do not want to mess up that formula." This would suggest that the safe money is on a more conservative round of upgrades to be expected sometime in 2026.

This is to say that all signs point to Toyota still being in the planning stages of the new RAV4 last time we checked, so nothing has really been confirmed as yet for the US, although the RAV4 Dark Side Performance Concept shown at 2025 TAS may offer some hints of what Toyota's cooking up. Toyota claims to be taking inspiration from pop culture with the concept cars shown at Tokyo Auto Salon, suggesting that it hopes to "recreate in the real world the mobility that appeals in the world of science fiction such as movies, anime, and games."

While we might have some exciting expansions to the RAV4 lineup to look forward to, we wouldn't expect anything too crazy to happen to the base SUV itself. Cooper Erickson says that, year after year, the trend has been to give customers more of what they want. That means that Toyota is not out to dramatically reinvent the RAV4 every time, but to simply improve it, bit by bit, without abandoning what makes it so popular in the first place. That is what Toyota's Kaizen philosophy is all about.

Sources: Toyota Press Room, Automotive News.

2025-01-16T08:59:44Z