"Wobbles the Mind" (wobblesthemind)
12/26/2016 at 21:08 • Filed to: Sales Figures
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"Wobbles the Mind" (wobblesthemind)
12/26/2016 at 21:08 • Filed to: Sales Figures | 4
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*By the way, a used K900 is starting to hit around $25,000 right now. That’s the same price as a loaded, brand new Soul Exclaim (!).
In the US the Kia Soul has sold 133,341 units YTD for 2016. The Kia K900 has sold 754 units YTD. Now if you go over to S. Korea however the K900 has been outselling the Kia Soul significantly! A whopping 2,437 Kia K9 sedans have been sold YTD in Korea. That smashes the Kia Soul’s 2,118 unit YTD figure!
So if you have ever wondered why automakers won’t offer an interesting car for your market, or why they build a specific car to your market, this is exactly the kind of thing they are afraid of.
The only K900 I’d even consider would be the ones with the indigo interiors. Still only $35,000 right now!
I used GoodCarBadCar for the US numbers. For the Korean sales figures I grabbed from Focus2Move.
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Funny thing is looking at Hyundai and Kia’s market share. Now add in the fact that the top brass (like all top brass) will do anything to grow that total market dominance. Heck, out of the top 20 best selling vehicles in S. Korea for 2016 only four of them aren’t a Hyundai or Kia and only the Chevrolet Spark cracks the top ten.
Probenja
> Wobbles the Mind
12/26/2016 at 21:32 |
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South Korea sure loves their trucks:
1st in 2016 sales and the Kia version is 9th.
Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Wobbles the Mind
12/26/2016 at 21:32 |
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The Soul is cheap. It’s practical. It’s nice. It is easy to park and will carry a lot of stuff for something so small. I’m not surprised at the popularity in the US.
Doesn’t South Korea have crazy laws about displacement, vehicle size, etc, just like a lot of other countries? That might make a Soul a lot less desirable.
OPPOsaurus WRX
> Eric @ opposite-lock.com
12/26/2016 at 22:39 |
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Could u imagine if they tried that over here? All I can think of is “they took our displacement” in the Southpark redneck voice
HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles
> Wobbles the Mind
12/26/2016 at 22:46 |
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A lot of that is about brand image, and patriotism. In America Kia is still looked at like this,
A company that makes cheap cars, for people that can’t do any better. Something to be ashamed of. Something that says “I couldn’t afford a Honda. And so a Kia that starts at 49,000 dollars just doesn’t make sense to most Americans. I mean you could buy a Cadillac, or Lexus, even a BMW for that. Even that fact that the car “comes from Korea” is a mark against it. Now all of that is okay on a humble hatchback(even if the call it an SUV) but it doesn’t fly on a luxury sedan.
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Wobbles the Mind
> Probenja
12/26/2016 at 22:56 |
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S. Korea, they are so much like US!
ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable)
> HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles
12/26/2016 at 22:59 |
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Racism hasn’t gone anywhere. Good job, America!
People said the same thing about Lexus when they started. Now, can SK do another ‘Lexus’ and achieve the same level of respect? That remains very much to be seen.
I’m not saying Hyundai/Kia don’t build very good cars. They do. But Toyota had the advantage of already being extraordinarily reliable and well built _before_ they decided to attack the luxury market.
I am not yet convinced Kia can build the quality of car people will continue to buy AND also advance their brand in the luxury market. Quality is expensive to engineer. Building luxury cars doubly so.
I wish them much success as more competition always helps everyone achieve more.
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Wobbles the Mind
> HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles
12/26/2016 at 23:11 |
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I completely agree though I don’t think it’s as rampant in the mainstream community as it is in the enthusiast community and for those that had a poor experience with one of their cars and especially bad dealership services.
I listen to the way Europeans talk about American cars and it’s the same way even when an $80k Corvette out paces a $150k 911 or a Camaro trashes an M4 that runs on supersoaker fluid. I also look at the way Toyota and Nissan are treated overseas compared to here and I’m realizing that every brand faces the same challenges some where.
Despite what people say we are all the same.
C62030
> Wobbles the Mind
12/27/2016 at 06:27 |
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Is it just me, or from the side, does this thing look like a baby Panamera?
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles
12/27/2016 at 11:28 |
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I don’t think it’s patriotism. This car really is the definition of what people think of when they think “Kia”. The problem is that their history in the US is long enough that they’re fairly well known and what they’ve been known for is crappy cheap cars. Their first decent cars offered in the US market were around 2010 an they were still selling some pretty shitty cars through 2013. They only made a serious turnaround in 2014, so it has only been about 2-3 years that they’ve had an entirely respectable line.
At the moment, I can’t think of a single car or SUV in their present line in the US that I wouldn’t be pretty happy to drive.
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> Wobbles the Mind
12/27/2016 at 12:11 |
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They also packed the lowest rungs of rental car fleets for a while, which is probably the only way many people have ever been behind the wheel of a Kia (up until a recent opportunity to drive a 2016 Soul, my list was all rental cars, and every other Kia I had been in before late last year was terrible).
Actually, Europeans don’t hate American cars. Korean cars have all been shitty and cheap until Hyundai and Kia upped their game in the last 3-5 years. The third-gen Optima was Kia’s first foray into producing decent cars. Hyundai wasn’t far ahead of them. Europeans have long accepted Ford products as decent practical cars, sometimes even slightly desirable ones. Certainly similar levels of respect to VW, maybe even a bit better. GM has a bunch of brands in Europe that are also accepted (they are just rarely sold under US brand names), you just might not realize who makes them. The fact that not all cars sold in the US would have a market there doesn’t mean they look down on them, it’s just that they are not familiar with them.
The South Korean automakers have a really bad reputation that even the Japanese never developed to quite that level. The earliest SK cars to make it to the US were awful. My Aunt, a school teacher that I spent considerable time with, was the first person I ever knew to own a car from South Korea, her little red Hyundai Excel. It was an objectively terrible car, but by the standards of the era it was better than many other cheap cars. Hyundai didn’t turn around in any meaningful way until about 5-8 years ago, Kia was even more recent, and Daewoo almost went bankrupt (now they produce the shittiest new cars sold in the US, sold under GM brand names).
It’s hard to shake a reputation built over 20-25 years...
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Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> OPPOsaurus WRX
12/27/2016 at 12:17 |
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It would probably cause riots and possibly wars. The only marginally similar tax we have is the “gas guzzler tax”. Due to the existing cars/trucks/vans/etc we have here, such a regime would be devastating to the US market.
Much of the world sends us cars that would be prohibitively-expensive to register and operate in their local markets.
Dru
> Wobbles the Mind
12/27/2016 at 23:27 |
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I would daily the crap out of a K900.