Hyundai North America will debut a new car or truck next month, Mike O’Brien, the company’s vice president of corporate and product planning, told Car and Driver at the Detroit auto show. “We will be launching a new vehicle [at the February auto show] in Chicago,” O’Brien said, but he declined to give details on the forthcoming product.
He did, however, quash our hopes that it would be a production version of the Santa Cruz concept, a popular mid-size pickup the Korean automaker unveiled two years ago in Detroit. “It’s not the Santa Cruz,” O’Brien said. “Hopefully we’ll have something to share with you soon on that.”
Some kind of truck or utility vehicle would help Hyundai’s product portfolio, and Chicago has been known as a place where automakers reveal larger vehicles. Press preview days for the Chicago auto show are February 9 and 10.
A Daily Headache
Hyundai’s U.S. new-vehicle sales grew for a seventh straight year in 2016, edging up 2 percent at 775,005 units. Like other automakers, though, Hyundai saw waning interest in its mainstream car models such as the Elantra and the Sonata. Among the automaker’s cars, the only ones to post increases in 2016 were the Accent subcompact (up 30 percent to 79,766 units) and the oddball Veloster (up 24 percent to 30,053). Among the SUVs, the Santa Fe posted an 11 percent increase, to 131,257 units, while sales of the Tucson grew 41 percent, to 89,713 units.
So there’s much potential for growth when it comes to Hyundai’s trucks.
“That’s my daily headache,” O’Brien said. The company simply does not have the production capacity. “We could increase sales of our Tucson dramatically if we had more production. We could increase our Santa Fe Sport volume significantly with some more production. We could increase our long-wheelbase, three-row Santa Fe significantly . . . with more production,” he said. “So, for us, it’s all about the steps it takes to get that extra production and investment in place.”
It’s not such an easy task, when considering generational commitments of the entire product line, he added.
Still “Excited” for the Santa Cruz
Meanwhile, the company is still “excited” about the potential for the Santa Cruz, O’Brien said. “We’re working very hard on the project,” he said. “We’re working as hard as we can to make it happen.”
O’Brien made it clear that the Santa Cruz is not a 100 percent certainty. “But it makes all the sense in the world for us, for a lot of reasons,” he said, including the lack of a pickup truck on the market that can achieve 30-plus miles per gallon.
O’Brien said a trend of millennials gravitating toward urban centers also argues in favor of the Santa Cruz. He envisions young professionals spending their weeks at office jobs in the city and then throwing kayaks or bikes in the back of a compact truck for a weekend rendezvous with Mother Nature. “They don’t need 7000 pounds’ worth of towing. They don’t need a big vehicle that’s difficult to maneuver and park,” he said.
Even in the truck-happy United States, gas-sipping mid-size pickups are still an anomaly, and Hyundai wants to get the Santa Cruz right. “With a truck, it’s all about proportion,” O’Brien said, noting that deriving one from a car platform can result in odd styling. Hyundai clearly considers the Santa Cruz to be more like a car than a full-size pickup and seems to shy away from the idea of the concept even being considered a pickup in the traditional sense.
The design seen two years ago is still intact, said O’Brien, who is part of Hyundai’s global design committee. “And, still, that design is what resonates with our company and [Chung Eui-sun], our vice chairman,” O’Brien said. “He wants that car.”
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