Toyota came tantalizingly close to overtaking General Motors (GM) as the world's biggest carmaker in terms of sales, falling short of its target by just over 3,000 vehicles.

Japan's biggest carmaker said it had sold 9.366m vehicles globally last year, up 6% from 2006, but fewer than the 9.369 sold by its US rival GM, the world's No 1 since 1931.

Toyota has been threatening to capture the top spot for some time. It replaced Ford as the second-biggest seller in the US last October, while GM has seen its market share shrink at home.

Analysts believe it is only a matter of time before Toyota replaces GM, having closed the gap with astonishing speed since 2006, when the US firm sold 9.1m vehicles worldwide compared with Toyota's 8.8m.

"It is definitely clear the momentum of growth is on Toyota's side," Yasuaki Iwamoto, auto analyst at Okasan Securities in Tokyo, told the Associated Press. "Toyota leads in the ability to develop new technology."

While it has been hit by sluggish demand in Japan, Toyota has successfully tapped into the greener instincts of a growing number of motorists. It has sold more than a million hybrid cars in the past decade and plans to offer hybrid versions of all of its models after 2020.

The firm expects its aggressive overseas marketing will lift sales by 5% this year to 9.85m vehicles.

Publicly, however, Toyota executives say they are unimpressed by talk of a race with GM.

"We are not concerned about who's first," Toyota's president, Katsuaki Watanabe, told the Nikkei business paper. "Even number two is fantastic. If a company grows complacent, it will quickly drop to number three or number four."