Australia has a new favourite Korean car brand, with booming Kia outselling Hyundai in 2022 to finish an impressive third on Australia's new-car sales chart - despite not having a single model inside the country's 10 most popular vehicles list.
Some 78,330 new Kias found owners across Australia last year – enough for the brand to edge its historical big brother Hyundai, which finished with 73,345 sales.
Two models in particular were doing the heavy lifting for Kia last year, with the Sportage shifting 18,792 units (up more than 136 percent), and the budget-friendly Cerato selling 12,354 examples (down 31.8 percent).
All up, Kia's annual result improved by more than 15 percent on the 67,964 sales the brand managed across 2021.
Hyundai, on the other hand, was led any the i30, which outsold any individual Kia model, and with 21,166 (down 17.2 percent) sales, finished number 10 on the national best-seller list.
Elsewhere, the Tucson (17,870 + 25.9 percent) and the Kona (11,538 - 9.5 percent) contributed strongly to the brand's annual tally.
A caveat, of course, is that it has been a strange sales year in Australia, with stock shortages, long queues and growing order books, so sales this year have at times been more a reflection of a brand's ability to secure stock.
But equally, the result has been convincing, with Kia holding its lead across the year to finish as the stronger brand, sales wise. But don't expect to hear too many champagne corks popping over at Kia HQ - at least, not for long.
“We take pride in a lot of the things that we’ve done, but whether we finish ahead of Hyundai or Mitsubishi doesn’t matter. You can only beat your chest for five minutes after that occurs, anyway,” the company's chief operating officer, Damien Meredith, told us in December.
“The growth's been there, and we wanted consistency for the brand and consistency in what we’ve been doing, and we’ve achieved that - that’s great, we just want to keep on doing it.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
