It is official. Hyundai-Kia is now the world’s fourth largest car manufacturer. This is, in fact, an amazing piece of information!

This year the South-Korean Auto giant, Hyundai-Kia jumped up a rank above forcing Ford Motors to take the fifth position in the list of top ten car makers in the world.

Now Hyundai-Kia is preceded by Toyota in the first place followed by General Motors and Volkswagen in the third position. The data come from the Automotive News Data Center.

Ford is succeeded by PSA-Peugeot-Citroen, while Honda and Nissan take the seventh and eight places, respectively. Suzuki is in the ninth place and Renault is ranked tenth.
The Korean car maker showed global sales for the first half of 2009 at 2,153,000 units, just edging out Ford’s 2,145,000 units so far this year.

It has to be noted that these numbers count the Nissan-Renault Alliance as two separate units, with 1.5 million and 1.1 million units, respectively. If combined they would replace Hyundai’s fourth and Ford’s fifth positions with over 2.6 million units.

Hyundai Motors India is the India’s second largest car manufacturer, while Maruti Suzuki securely holds the first position.