By Kim Tae-gyu

The time-honored belief that foreign vehicles most popular here are luxury sedans is shattered since a majority of offshore brands sold last month were those with engine displacements of less than 2 liters.

The Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association (KAIDA) said on Friday that the country’s 20-plus global brands sold 10,668 vehicles in April, up by 30 percent from a year ago.

Among them, 5,366 vehicles, or 50.3 percent, are small-sized cars as their engine capacity is smaller than 2 liters, or 2,000cc, the unprecedented event in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.

Merely 16 percent of them were those with engine displacements bigger than 3 liters, the norm widely expected for foremost foreign brands that have gained popularity quickly.

``The proportion of under 2-liter cars has been on the increase for the past few years but the pace accelerated this year from 41.9 percent in January to higher than 48 percent in each of the next two months,’’ KAIDA spokeswoman Park Eun-seok said.

``Due to the rising gas prices of late, domestic motorists seek affordable diesel or hybrid models with smaller engine sizes. The trend is also seen in the market for overseas automotive brands.’’

She added that such a trend is expected to continue for the time being.

The two best-selling models of MBW 520d and BMW 320d, whose sales stood at 899 and 565 apiece, are also small-sized models with engine displacements of 1.95 liters.

European automakers topped the list as they combined to attract 8,108 clients to account for 76 percent of the market spearheaded by the bellwethers BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

Japanese companies came in at second with 17.8 percent followed by the U.S. players with 6.1 percent.

By specific brand, BMW was a runaway leader with sales of 2,727 vehicles trailed by Mercedes-Benz with 1,673, Volkswagen with 1,330 and Audi with 1,228.

Of note is Toyota, which saw its monthly sales jump to 998 in April from 403 a year before thanks in no small part to its new Camry, the third best-selling model that debuted earlier this year.

Over the period, Toyota’s share out of overall performances of foreign brands more than doubled from 4.91 percent to 9.36 percent.

Traditionally, the local automotive market has been predominated by the two homegrown outfits of Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors that still carve out a vast majority of demand.

As a result, the dominance of the Korean duo has been one of the most thorny topics in the talks on free trade agreements with such countries as the United States, which claimed that Seoul employed non-tariff barriers against foreign automakers.

Yet, a mounting number of drivers, especially those from younger generations, snap up vehicles other than ones made by Hyundai or Kia so that the overall market share of global carmakers hit double digits of late.

The proportion is expected to keep rising to 20 percent in the not-so-distant future according to industry watchers.