Following Honda’s lead 5 days ago, Toyota Motor Philippines (including its luxury division, Lexus) is the next car manufacturer to unveil their official January 2018 prices taking into account the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion or TRAIN Law. And as one of the only handful of carmakers locally to boast of a full and diversified line-up (including pick-up trucks and hybrids), this is the first complete picture anyone has on the effect of Republic Act 10963 on vehicle prices.

Confirming what we have been reporting all along, pickups whether single or dual cabs are exempted from excise tax under TRAIN. This is evident of the Hilux’s 5.7 to 9 percent drop in its Suggested Retail Price, the biggest of which is on the top-of-the-line 4x4 2.8 G variant which sees a P 145,000 reduction in both manual and automatic variants. Interestingly enough, the Cab & Chassis model remains unchanged.

Aside from the Hilux, the only other vehicles in Toyota’s mainstream line-up that’s seen a drop in price is the Land Cruiser family. The poster child of the “pro-luxury” excise tax, the LC200 Premium drops 7 percent (P 4,650,000) while the Prado goes down 5 percent (P 3,739,000 for the manual and P 3,839,000 for the automatic). In a surprising twist, the Prado 4.0 V6 is unchanged at P 3,119,000. The Prius c has actually gone up 7 percent from P 1,709,000 to P 1,831,000, despite hybrids enjoying 50 percent less excise tax. This is likely due to foreign exchange rates. since it must be remembered that the Prius c has seen just minor price adjustments since the introduction of its facelift.

Similar to Honda’s case, the top-of-the-line compact sedan is heavily penalized under Republic Act 10963. Buyers of the Corolla Altis 2.0 V will have to shell out P 1,451,000 or 9.92 percent more than its December 2017 SRP. Vehicles in the same price range such as the RAV4 (4x2 Active and Active+) and Fortuner (4x2 2.4 G and 4x2 2.7 G) are likewise hit.


Moving on to Toyota’s luxury brand, Lexus, almost the entire line-up has seen a reduction in their SRPs with the only exception being the LC 500 (up 3.55 percent) and the IS 350 which have retained their SRPs for January. The biggest drop in SRP for January are the hybrids in the GS, RX, and NX family which went down 20.31, 20.76, and 15.62 percent respectively. Among the non-hybrids, the Lexus RC F lost up to 13 percent of its value almost overnight.


For those keeping score versus our predictions last month, we managed to stay within 5 percent of the new official SRPs (so that makes the score CarGuide.PH - 2, Certain Social Media Influencer Who Shared Our Tables Without Our Assumptions and Called Us Erroneous - 0). Although this isn’t as close to our prediction with Honda, where we stayed within just 2 percent), we still came pretty close, especially with the Lexus models where we were less than 1 percent off (the closest being the LC 500 with just a 0.22 percent variance). In terms of mainstream models, we were near the money with the Toyota 86 (1.21 percent variance), Vios 1.5 G (2.35 percent variance), and Hilux (3.11 percent variance). We were off 4.94 percent on the Land Cruiser LC200 thinking Toyota would be able to price it even less than the eventual SRP.

All tables are high-resolution. If you cannot read the tables, simple open them in a new tab. You can also download or print them for reference. Please, just do not crop out the watermark. (shrug).