But what about individual brands’ biggest-selling cars of all time? So we reached for our calculator and started digging – some of the information was easy to find, others less so. And some of the results were surprising – many marques' best-sellers were last sold a long time ago, so join us on an intriguing and varied journey. For this list we have focused on nameplates, rather than distinct models.

We didn’t have data for every brand, and some of the numbers listed will still be growing, fast, but for the one’s we do have we’ve ranked them from the smallest selling through to the largest: