After one of the most bold weeks of their existence, where they took the covers off their ambitious new i30 N hot hatch, Hyundai have now confirmed a lofty set of goals for the near future. They're calling it 'the road to 2021'.
The N is Hyundai's second 'big' model announcement as as many months, after they launched the Kona compact crossover back last month. And it's all just part of a four-step plan for the manufacturer's desires to become the highest selling manufacturer in Europe.
“Hyundai intends to become the top selling car company in Europe by 2021,” Thomas Schmid of Hyundai Motor Europe recently told the press at the German reveal of the i30 N.
“We want to make things easy for people, which is why we are number one for customer satisfaction in Europe. And to that we have devised four cornerstones as a business strategy ... Number one is our SUV line-up. Two, is future mobility, and three is what we call our DNA models; the ‘I’ family, while four is our high emotion models, N.”
"In Europe, we are selling more fuel-cell cars than all other brands combined. In 2018, we’ll launch a new fuel-cell SUV that will use a dedicated platform. [...] Hyundai will also launch its first pure electric car-sharing program in a major European metropolitan area."
Adding to their four-wheeled products are a number of incentives Hyundai are rolling out in Europe; including selling their cars online. That might sound like a novelty in one of the few industries where people like to see and touch the product before they hand over their money, but the company have claimed to have already sold more than 100 cars "in just a few weeks" with the tool.
And, really, why can't Hyundai accomplish this? They already have a juicy market share in Europe (with a current production capacity of 600,000 cars per annum), not to mention that they're a key player just about everywhere else at the moment.
That includes Australasia, where the ever popular Tuscon and Santa Fe are two of the 10 best sellers in New Zealand, while the Tuscon and new i30 are two of the 10 best sellers in Australia.