Canada Has Bought a Million RAV4s, and Ontario Built Most of Them

The Toyota RAV4 has passed one million sales in Canada, 30 years after the compact SUV went on sale there in 1996, and 807,909 of those million were built in Canada.

The milestone arrives on the back of the RAV4’s best month ever in the country. Canadian buyers took 6,195 of them in October 2026, and the RAV4 has now been Canada’s best-selling passenger vehicle for 10 years in a row.

Toyota Canada announced the milestone on November 10, and its release breaks the million down by generation in a way that shows how the RAV4 grew from a niche runabout into a mainstream family car. The first generation, sold from 1996 to 2000, found 29,890 Canadian buyers, and the second, from 2001 to 2005, found 40,151. Sales jumped to 148,961 for the third generation and 271,590 for the fourth, and the fifth generation, sold from 2019 to 2025, accounts for nearly half of the total on its own at 466,183. The new sixth generation has added 43,225 so far in 2026.

Gasoline models still make up most of the total, since hybrids only arrived two decades into the RAV4’s life in Canada. Of the million, 769,797 were gasoline-only models, 188,738 were hybrids and 41,465 were plug-in hybrids. The RAV4 Hybrid reached Canada in 2016 and the plug-in model, first sold as the RAV4 Prime, followed in 2021.

The production figure matters on both sides of the border. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada started assembling the RAV4 in 2008 and has built more than four million of them for the North American market, so the same Ontario lines that built about four in five of Canada’s RAV4s also build them for US buyers. The company employs 8,500 people at its plants in Cambridge and Woodstock, Ontario, and has built vehicles in Canada since 1988.

"For 30 years, Canadians have trusted RAV4 to be there for life’s everyday moments and biggest adventures," said Steve Pilkey, vice president of sales and marketing at Toyota Canada. Tim Hollander, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, said that "every RAV4 built in Canada represents the efforts of thousands of Canadians."

The Toyota Report Take

The number that stands out is not the million but how late in life most of it came. The RAV4 needed almost a quarter of a century to reach its first half-million Canadian sales and then did nearly the same again with one generation, which says as much about how completely the compact SUV replaced the family sedan as it does about the RAV4 itself. For American readers, the 807,909 figure is the reminder worth keeping: when tariffs and trade rules come up, the RAV4 in a US driveway may well have come from Woodstock, and the health of those Ontario lines is part of how many RAV4s US dealers can get.