What are the 10 countries that dominate the car manufacturing sector? In 2025, China remains the world’s leading producer of passenger cars (21.2 million cars produced), while the USA remains the global leader in the field of commercial vehicles – such as trucks and vans – with a total of 6.8 million. In this scenario, it is above all Asia that leads the large-scale production, while Europe struggles, despite being present in the top 10 with countries such as Germany and Spain. Italy, on the other hand, is going through a critical phase, with a decline in national production which reached -24% in 2025.
So let’s see the complete data, compared with 2024 so as to have a clearer overall picture.
The ranking of the countries that have built the most cars in the world
Before we can delve into the classification, it is necessary to make a distinction between cars intended for the transport of passengers and commercial vehicles, such as trucks, vans, etc. The global rankings, in fact, vary depending on the type of vehicle produced: as we will also see in the graphs below, this difference mainly affects production in the United States.
Top 10 private car manufacturers in 2025
As can also be seen in the graph below, China confirms itself as a global leader, with over 21.2 million private cars produced in 2025. The podium, in reality, is entirely Asian: Japan is in second place with 5.3 million cars, while India takes third place, with around 4 million cars. Also worth mentioning is South Korea, in 5th place.
Looking instead at Europe, 4 countries entered the ranking: Germany, Spain, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Top 10 commercial vehicle manufacturers in 2025
As anticipated, in the case of commercial vehicles the ranking changes and sees the United States in first place, significantly ahead of China with a total of 6.8 million vehicles produced (compared to 3.1 million in China). Asia still maintains its prestige, with Japan in 4th place and India in 5th, but Mexico (3rd place, 2.4 million vehicles), Canada (6th place, 774,000), Thailand (7th place, 668,000) and Turkey (9th place, 394,000) enter the ranking.
The data for 2024
Looking instead to 2024, China maintains the global record with 27.4 million private cars produced, joined by 3.8 million commercial vehicles. For the United States, the situation is similar to 2025, with a clear supremacy regarding commercial vehicles produced (9.2 million) against 1.4 million cars. As this graph shows, the big change compared to 2025 concerns Indonesia, which last year dropped out of the top 10. In 2024, however, the Southeast Asian country had produced around 1 million private cars and 170,000 commercial vehicles.
The position of Italy
But Italy? Our country is not positioned in any of these top 10: in 2025, in fact, 361,611 vehicles were produced in the Peninsula (both private and commercial), compared to a European total of 12.4 million cars built.
The balance, unfortunately, is negative when compared to previous years: it is a decrease of -24% compared to 2024, when the country had produced 474,000 vehicles, and of as much as -49% if we take into consideration the period 2019-2025. A figure also confirmed by the Italian Metalworkers Federation (FIM-CISL), which recently published the 2025 report in which it signals a collapse in the production of Stellantis (the giant that controls FIAT) which last year in Italy produced only 213,706 cars (-24.5%).
If we also consider the United Kingdom and Türkiye, Italy ranks 9th in the ranking of European car producing countries.
