Quote:
Originally Posted by juliog
Chief Designer California Studio would like the South Korean automaker to produce a small rear-wheel-drive sports car
does not equal to
Kia planning to build an 86 competitor
It won't happen. A large part of the public still dismisses the Genesis Coupe for being a Hyundai, how many would even look at a Kia?
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Public perception of the Hyundai group is changing immensely fast. The only thing that has stopped the 20%+ year-over-year growth that they were seeing in 2009-2012 is that they literally cannot make vehicles fast enough. Despite doubling their domestic production capacity in the past couple years, they still remain unable to produce fast enough to meet demand.
In just the 4 years they've been seeing these huge 20+% increases in sales every year, and their market share has
doubled here. In 15 years, their market share has increased by 10 TIMES. Today, 1 in 10 cars sold in the US are from the Hyundai Group, and they split that pretty evenly between Hyundai and Kia.
They totally leap-frogged Nissan in market share a couple years ago leaving them in the dust, and are nipping on the heels of Honda (and surpass them many months). If they can fix their capacity issues and produce the vehicles they need to, they will surpass Honda in the next year or two, and put a new name in the Top 5 automakers in the US for the first time in over 30 years.
While normally a design study is a long leap to 'planning' on building a car, in this case, it is not 'news' that Kia is considering a vehicle of this sort. In fact, Kia has demonstrated physical concepts in the past, numerous times over the past couple years stated that it was developing a production RWD coupe, and has recently
confirmed plans to produce a RWD coupe for release in approximately 2 years and confirmed that the powerplant is to be a twin-turbo'd V6 powerplant. So this view of the (or 'a') car is no surprise.
Besides, in a world where
KIA releases a full-size V8-powered luxury sedan, can one really be surprised that they're working on anything? At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Kia said they were working on a jet car.