Hyundai will increase prices up to $2000: Includes existing orders

Hyundai Australia just quietly jacked up the costs that patient customers like you will have to pay for one of their brand new cars. This is how corporate greed burns consumer trust…

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Hyundai just quietly jacked up the costs a whole bunch of patiently waiting customers will have to pay for one of their brand new cars.

Owing to the global shortage of corporate compassion for ordinary people, none was offered in this instance - seemingly. What can we do? 

I'd suggest it would be impolite not to return the favour would it not? AutoExpert is after all, renowned for politeness...

Car brands and their dealers certainly don’t have any qualms taking your deposit, accepting $30,000, $50,000 or even $70,000 or more in exchange for one of their shiny-but-imperfect vehicles. But when it comes to customer care (it’s a joke, by the way), there’s plenty more car companies and their dealerships can do to turn your frown upside down - like not jacking up prices already previously agreed to in good faith. 

Worse still is excusing yourself from guilt or retracting your grubby money-grabbing, as a company, just because everybody else in your industry is doing it. It shouldn’t be this way.

Now, Hyundai Australia just had a bunch of senior executive meetings, which is always ominous.

The upshot is: If you’ve been waiting patiently in a new-Hyundai queue for months now, making endless phone calls to get updates and sacrificing the interest your deposit could’ve been earning sitting in your bank account - good news. Your new Hyundai won’t be forthcoming before 1st August and prices are going up.

Here’s the full Hyundai statement >>

Oh, and the new, exciting proposition for you could well be: Pay more, or join the back of the queue.

Did you hear the knife coming out, in those first two sentences? I certainly did. I’m also getting a sense that a standard-sized airsick bag might be inadequate for what follows, in the full Hyundai Australia PR nausea scripture.

Here it comes:

Just let that sink in for a moment.

Essentially it’s just a rollercoaster of corporate weasel words that offer ‘not our fault’ type excuses. This is including an allegedly unprecedented rise in raw material costs, inflationary pressures across the supply chain, build complexity, “geographical location of the Hyundai production plant” - although I was unaware they’d moved it; I thought Ulsan was still smack-bang in the middle of South-east Asia.

…And the “specialised nature of the product”. Whatever that bullshit means.

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A KICK IN THE GUTS

Here is a table outlining exactly how deep the additional charge will be in your case.

The biggest increase is on i20 N for a cheeky $2000. Balance of additional charges are either $500 or $1200. Total impact of the increases is 42 per cent of the model range, according to them. Someone took the time to calculate that. Certainly not me.

So, let’s do an economics thought experiment. Hyundai has sold 38,000 cars in Australia so far in 2022. Approximately, perhaps they have 5000-10,000 orders for cars on the ‘price hike’ list on the books, which they are unable to supply before August 1, let’s say. And let’s assume the average increase is $1000.

This is, therefore, a grubby cash grab for $5-$10 million, roughly. To be extracted from people like you, who sat down across from a Hyundai dealer (despite having 30 other brands to buy from) and negotiated a price, then waited patiently to “join the family”.

Hyundai Motor Company is a multi-trillion-won operation spanning the globe, with about $130 billion in annual revenue and $260 billion in assets. And they’ve taken the decision to come after potential family-joiners like you for $1200 apiece, or something. Having come so far from the garbage brand it used to be in the 1990s - this is a warning, don’t stuff it up now.

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From the Getz...

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to the i30 N...

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and the hyper-desirable Ioniq 5.

To think how far the company has come in the last decade, all the good cars they’ve made, all the investment and all those hearts won over.

Instead of this, they could have said: “...blah, blah, blah, covid, chip shortage, supply and demand, plus the horrendous cost of moving Ulsan to wherever means prices are up from August 1 - however, you need not fear - because orders placed prior to August 1 will be price protected. Because we appreciate the value of your commitment to us.” The options were money or ethics, and they chose money.

If you’re wondering how decisions like this get made, you need to understand the basic structure of a car import operation in Australia, because this does impact the thought process.

There’s a senior executive management team of elite shot-callers, which operates in a boardroom that disconnects them from the real world. They’re not people like you and me, with our quaint hopes, dreams and household budgets. 

And the composition of their corporate team really matters if you want to understand what it takes to build the perfect corporate boardroom. These people are carefully selected because there’s a process.

It helps to remember the following acronym. SEWWR:

Snakes, Eunuchs, Wankers, Weasels and Rats. That’s what it takes to import cars successfully in this country. (Not talking specifically about Hyundai here - all car import operations use this model.) 

Small talk with a typical CEO can render you braindead in 30 minutes.

Snakes are the commercial guys. They’re not in the car business, they’re in the money business, getting as much in as possible.

The top brain in a car import operation is invariably a snake, he’s here under sufference, often pretty high up on the sociopathy spectrum, as is his 2IC, typically. Team Snake is on top.

Eunuchs have so much to offer, but get no appreciation. Source: Lego.

Eunuchs are the unfortunate lot who actually care about cars, and sadly, have a real passion for the product and (heaven forbid) actual technical qualifications relating to it. Product planning, technical training, compliance - things of that nature. They wouldn’t work in any other industry. Cars or death, kind of thing.

To team Eunuch, cars are something to embrace, even to love. They’re visceral things. Eunuchs eat endless shit just to embrace the privilege of getting their hands on cars. 

To everyone else on the board, of course, cars are merely an abstraction. They couldn’t care less. This is why the rest of the board cuts off the balls of every Eunuch on the team. They’ve got nowhere else to go.

Wankers are Team Marketing, of course. Professional masturbators. Guardians of the brand with the easiest job in the world, to just do what the agency says, go to lunch lots, get told how great you are, endlessly, then, if it all fails, fire the agency and go again. A perfect fit for the talentless tool.

Wanker.

Weasel.

Weasels claim to be Customer Care >>. The dark art of seeming to give a shit while actually seeing how many legitimate claims can be denied, thus pumping up the bottom line. 

Rats are cunning, intelligent creatures, let’s not forget.

Rats are found in HR and legal. Where would we be without the timely input from Team Rat, to make sure every dumb call doesn’t violate any important policies?

So, as I see it, this absurd Hyundai Australia decision to go for the cash and throw the brand under the bus is most probably mainly the result of a boardroom scuffle between Team Snake and Team Wanker. I can see the senior VP of snake operations making a fairly compelling case: $5-$10 million extra sounds pretty good in the weekly conference call back to Seoul. There’d be a case of SoJu in that.

GM of Wank Operations was probably up against the ropes, pointing out that this is a bad look for the brand, which someone will doubtless point out, possibly on YouTube, while the head of Weasel operations and the top Rat freshen up the coffees and Old Squeaky from product planning gets the foil off the platter of those little triangle sandwiches with the corners cut off.

This is much closer to what actually happens - in every car import operation in the nation - than you might think.

BURSTING THE EXECUTIVE BUBBLE

Perhaps this battle was a foregone conclusion at Hyundai because car companies are predisposed to lean this way anyway.

No matter if you’re the company’s top Snake, the Eunuch-in-chief, the Wanker, the Weasel, the Rat - no matter where you are in the SEWWR of elite car import operations, for any brand, ultimately the one thing you’ve all got in common is:

You typically have no idea what it’s like to sit down in a dealership and pass your own hard-earned $50,000 to $70,000 - whatever amount - across the table, in exchange for a badge with a car attached, which you will depend upon for your sole transportation for the next five years. You people have no fucking idea.

The whole concept of doing that - it’s just an abstraction inside the SEWRR, where one is super-insulated from the reality of actually owning a car. Hands up, any senior executives in car companies, in Australia, who’ve actually bought a new car recently? You won’t see many hands go up, if any, I’m tipping.

The managing director chooses the hot new performance car to take home this week, so he’s ‘familiar’ with the product, of course.

What’s the easiest thing for a carmaker to do, as a fringe benefit to senior employees? Hand them a new car every three months, for free, and one for the missus, if you don’t mind. Plus, here’s a big pool of cars, and you can drive any one at any time. 

Buying a car - committing to the deal - handing over your own fat stack of cash and actually joining the alleged “family”, that’s not something a senior car company exec or middle-manager ever does.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that they cannot empathise with people like you, people standing in line, stressed about your mortgage or even getting to the job you’ve worked hard for? They can’t see decisions like this for the kick in the guts which they actually are.

This is why they can all sit around in the SEWWR boardroom with their platter of crustless triangle sandwiches and high-five each other over a consensus that decisions like this are acceptable in the circumstances. This is moral relativism off its medication.

Sorry, Hyundai, I do usually love your work, but throwing real people under the bus at the 11th hour of their extended wait-in-queue experience is a pretty shit way to welcome them to the family.

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