The electric Hyundai Kona starts to arrive in Norway
The first shipment of the Hyundai Kona – Hyundai’s new electric crossover – outside South Korea has arrived in Norway as Hyundai start to try and satisfy demand and orders.
Key to that is the Kona’s range of around 300 miles (when you buy the 64kWh version – a bit under 200 miles for the smaller battery version), its on the Zeitgeist crossover/urban SUV shape – and its price.
The relatively low price for the Kona (in the UK it costs from under £30k for the 64kWh Kona) gave us the first indication of the prospects for Kona sales when Hyundai in Norway put it on sale – and got 20,000 expressions of interest in no time at all and had to close the order books.
As far as we can tell, Hyundai only has the capacity to build 30,000 electric Kona’s a year, and on current form they could probably sell all those in Norway. They look to have confirmed orders in Norway of around 10,000 already.
But Hyundai is now starting to fulfil those orders, with the first Kona EVs to be shipped outside South Korea now landing in Norway, with the first boat delivering 100 Konas to Europe’s electric car capital, and the promise of 100s more due to arrive this month.
It does look like Hyundai has a real hit on its hands with the Kona EV, but it also looks like it has the same sort of problem Tesla has encountered with the Model 3 – it can’t build enough quickly enough. But we don’t mind betting Hyundai will resolve that problem a lot more efficiently than Tesla.
Paul GOVAN says
Re your: “Hyundai only has the capacity to build 30,000 electric Kona’s a year”.
Nonsense – they only have the WILL to produce very limited niche volumes. Relatively tiny Tesla by contrast is now popping out 5000+ Model 3’s a week – Hyundai is the world’s 5th largest combustion vehicle manufacturer ! The idea that Hyundai couldn’t do what Tesla are doing and pop out 5000 Konas eSUVs a week is ABSURD ! Hyundai have the resources, the capacity, the expertise and the experience – but like the rest of the world’s major carmakers they still lack the will to do anything genuinely disruptive until and unless they’re forced to do so.
Recall that an alliance/cabal of the world’s major car manufacturers earlier this year showed their TRUE colours(ie. not green) when they succeeded in persuading the EPA and Trump to ditch hard-fought clean car/fuel economy/EV legislation. Hyundai could easily sell 150,000 Kona EVs and 200,000 Niro eSUVs a year worldwide starting NOW if they actually wanted to. Simple as that.
And the same ugly truth applies to the rest of the fork-tongued foot-draggers aka “global alliance”.
Paul G