Hyundai Freezes Fleet Sales, Dealer Network Size to Help Dealerships
It's good news for consumers, who will likely have an easier time getting a new car thanks to Hyundai's changes.
It can be easy to forget that in addition to supplying regular people like you with vehicles, many automakers also have extensive contracts to supply cars to car rental companies and other big corporate fleets. Usually, that's not a big deal, but in 2022, when a global semiconductor shortage is making producing anything with circuits a real challenge, it's causing some problems.
Rather than ride the fence and make everybody halfway happy, Hyundai has decided to freeze all its fleet contracts and instead divert all production to retail vehicle sales, Automotive News reported Sunday. It's also somehow managing to increase overall vehicle production to meet consumer demand, ahead of what it expects to be another record-breaking sales year.
Even with all the extreme supply constraints, Hyundai says it sold 694,349 vehicles in the US in 2021, which itself was a 20% improvement over sales in 2020 -- though, to be fair, beating sales numbers from 2020 probably wasn't a huge lift, per se. Still, that's a lot of affordable automobiles to move, especially given Hyundai's other announcement to dealers: It's freezing the size of its dealer network.
Yep, no new Hyundai dealers for the foreseeable future. Hyundai wants to ensure that each of its current 800 or so dealers gets sufficient inventory, so adding to the network and spreading its available production even more thinly would be unhelpful. This should keep current dealers happy, and frankly, even in a country the size of the US, 800 dealers make for pretty good coverage.
Hyundai didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
