"People have run out of things to do with conventional cars so they just end up reshuffling the deck. There are hundreds of variants of cars on the road, and mostly they're variants for the sake of variants. Look at how things converged with the phone — there used to be hundreds of flip phones, now what do we have? It'll be like that."
So said Elon Musk earlier this year at Tesla’s Investor Day, when discussing how many model variants there would be long-term in the firm’s line-up. He settled on “around 10” for Tesla.
It’s a quote I’ve come back to several times already since, not only when wondering why a car maker needs yet another coupé version of an SUV, but also alongside proclamations of X amount of new cars from Y within Z years.
One such announcement came this week, with Hyundai Motor Group’s plans to have 31 new EVs on sale by 2030. The volume goal is 3.64 million units across those 31 models, including cars from Hyundai, Kia and Genesis. So while 31 might seem a big number, crudely split across three brands it equates to around 10 cars per brand, therefore similar to Musk’s Tesla, and not simply “variants for the sake of variants”, plugging every conceivable niche.
More intriguing is the target to become a top three EV manufacturer globally. Top three may not sound the most ambitious target, given Hyundai sits in the top three already across all models globally (ie combustion-engined cars as well as anything electric), yet for EVs the group sits only just inside the top 10 of EV manufacturers, far behind the likes of Tesla and China’s rapidly-expanding BYD.
While Hyundai may lag in sales terms globally, it has so far done a very good job of creating very different electric cars in size, style and positioning to its internal combustion engined models.
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