Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
Hyundai Motor will launch eleven more pure electric vehicles in Europe until the end of the decade and one of those will be a smaller EV costing around 20,000 euros, according to Hyundai Europe’s marketing chief Andreas-Christoph Hofmann.
At the Automotive News Europe Congress held in Prague, Hofmann said Hyundai “is working on a battery-powered minicar, but it will take some time to develop a production-ready version” adding that “everybody in the industry knows the target of this kind of vehicle is 20,000 euros”.
“City cars are tough to sell profitably because of their low pricing and due to the technical problems in electrifying small vehicles”, the Marketing Chief said.
Earlier this week, the company debuted its first fully electric sedan IONIQ 6 priced at $42,000 for the South Korean market. The model delivers an estimated range of over 610 km (379 miles) and is the Hyundai’s first vehicle allowing over-the-air (OTA) updates of the media software, maps, autonomous driving, and battery.
The production of the model is scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2022 with the market launch to be announced later.
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As recently reported, the automaker is preparing to increase its investment in electric vehicle production in 2023 with the resumption of hiring, the construction of a new plant in South Korea, and the renovation of an old factory built in 1968, the Korean Economic Daily reported.
“We decided on the local investment to become a leading company in the future automobile sector with EV capacity expansion and to ensure the job security of employees,” said a Hyundai official.
Recently, Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk commented in a tweet saying the South Korean automaker Hyundai is “doing pretty well” having 9% of the EV market share in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2022. The pie chart shows Tesla’s leadership in the first quarter with an EV market share of 75.8% followed by Hyundai with 9% and the German automaker Volkswagen with 4.6%.
Earlier this year, Hyundai Motor Group announced that will invest more than $10 billion in the United States by 2025 to accelerate innovation and mobility electrification, after the meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul.
Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter