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Originally Posted by JSH
The USA is not the Korean's primary EV market.
Kia and Hyundai sold 90,860 EVs in 2018 (double 2017 sales). Most of those were sold in Korea and the EU. They are strategically sending available cars to their home market and to EU countries with strong EV sales due to government incentives.
In the USA they are restricting sales to US states with high EV sales. This means that some CARB states don't get EVs and some non-CARB states like Texas do. It makes no sense to offer EV sales in a places where training the service and sales staff to support EVs would cost more than the sales of the actual vehicles. Hyundai & Kia USA can sell every EV they are allocated in only 14 states so why would they expand to other states?
This is all designed to maximize profit. Hyundai and Kia buy a limited number of batteries each year from LG and SK. They send the limited number of EVs available to places with high sales to minimize the need to discount unsold units. Limiting the geographical areas that sell EVs also minimizes logistics and training costs.
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Hyundai and Kia only sold 12,992 EVs worldwide in 2017, and double that is still only about 26,000 EVs in 2018, which is roughly a month of Tesla sales from Q4 of last year.
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According to market researcher IHS and the automobile industry on July 6, Hyundai and Kia sold a total of 12,992 electric vehicles including Soul EV and Ioniq Electric cars in the global market last year. The figure is a 50% spike from more the 8,561 units in 2015.
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Hyundai-Kia Motors Rank Third in Sales of Electric Cars in World - 비즈니스코리아 - BusinessKorea
It's fine for a manufacturer to only target regions with large incentives to maximize profits, but those are still compliance EVs.
