India January 2014: Honda City breaks into Top 10 for first time

Honda City

* See the Top 60 best-selling models by clicking on the title! Thanks Ducu, Piyush *

New car sales in India continue on their surprising downward trend this month at -7% year-on-year to an estimated 215,000 registrations. The models ranking already sees a few very interesting developments ahead of a 2014 year which will be fertile in newcomers. The Maruti Alto keeps the pole position with 23,362 sales, however this is 19% below its January 2013 score. The culprit could be the all-new Maruti Celerio which is the replacement for the Alto worldwide… It lands at #25 this month with 2,760 sales while the Maruti Swift DZire passes its hatchback counterpart the Swift once again at #2 and 19,232 units vs. 19,027.

Maruti Celerio

As the Hyundai Grand i10 confirms it is a runaway hit at #5 with 9,738 sales, the Honda City, absent from the ranking for the last 3 month as the previous model was discontinued, reappears and delivers record ranking and volumes thanks to the new generation, jumping to #9 with 7,184 sales, with its previous bests being #11 in August 2011 and 6,164 units in September 2010! These are however not all-time highs for a Honda model: these records still belong to the Amaze at 9,564 sales last October and #7 reached for the first time last August but also this month. The Ford Ecosport is #17, the Nissan Terrano beats its twin the Renault Duster for the first time at #22 vs. #23 and the Tata Nano is back up to #30 thanks to the addition of the Twist variant.

Tata Bolt

Tata Zest

Hyundai xcent

Ford Figo Sedan Concept

The reason why Indian sales figures have taken so long to be published is because the entire country has been obsessed by the Dehli Auto Expo 2014, which was the theatre of a flurry of world premieres for models that have the potential to upset the status-quo in the Indian sales charts in 2014-2015. We’re not even talking about the much-hyped Datsun Go due to go on sale in the country over the next couple of months… Among others, Tata unveiled the Bolt hatchback and Zest sedan, Hyundai launched xcent – the sedan variant of the Grand i10, and Ford the Figo Sedan Concept. I’m betting on the xcent as the most successful of the bunch by the time 2014 comes to an end. Do you agree?

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One year ago: India January 2013: Maruti DZire and VW Polo shoot high

Full January 2014 Top 60 models Ranking Table below.