Hyundai Motor Co. CEO Jaehoon Chang projects that the company’s electric vehicle (EV) sales across the Hyundai and Genesis brands will increase 57% to 220,000 units in 2022, and up to a whopping 1.7 million units across the Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands in 2026 — reports Automotive News.
The latest numbers have South Korea’s flagship automaker selling a total of 140,000 EVs in 2021, so Chang’s forecast represents sales growing a little over 12 times as much over the course of the next five years.
Hyundai may have lost out on the opportunity to build the Apple Car, but the veteran automaker has big plans of its own.
The new production estimates come from an upgraded internal goal at Hyundai, which ambitiously raises the company’s previous goal of selling 1 million EVs across the globe by 2025.
“That’s the transition that we would like to pursue. As fast as possible,” Chang, who was tapped for CEO of Hyundai Motor Co. just one year ago in December 2020, told Automotive News. “We will go very aggressively on electrification.”
To achieve its zealous objectives, Hyundai will invest heavily in factory capacity for EVs in the U.S. as part of a $7.4 billion USD investment plan the company will outline next year.
Under the investment plan, Hyundai will also develop a new, dedicated EV platform to support its global lineup of all-electric offerings, derived from the platform used to build its IONIQ line of EVs.
At the same time, the South Korean carmaker will suspend investments in Internal Combustion Engine technology. Hyundai intends to transition its premium Genesis brand to all-electric by 2025, and have a 100% zero-emission portfolio of products across all three of its brands by 2030.
