Hyundai News:Hyundai Elantra Sales To Slow Down In 2012 Due To Factory Capacity

[William Maley]

William Maley

Editor/Reporter - CheersandGears.com

January 31, 2012

The Hyundai Elantra has been a success for the Korean brand, seeing a 41% sales increase this past year. The Elantra also picked up the North American Car of the Year in January, and the icing on the cake will be a new coupe and five-door joing the Elantra. However, all isn’t well for the Elantra according to a report to Bloomberg.

Hyundai says they’ve hit their production capacity at the the company's Montgomery, Alabama plant. Last year, the plant churned out 338,000 vehicles, 10% above the plant’s capacity. About 55% of those vehicles built were new Elantras.

“The growth will be capped only because of production capacity,” said Dave Zuchowski, Hyundai Motor America’s executive vice president of national sales. “We’re going to sell what we did last year but our growth curve will plateau just because of capacity.”

With Hyundai posting 20% overall sales growth in the U.S. in 2011, the brand needs to solve this problem. Rumors floating around say the company could announce another North America plant.

Source: Bloomberg

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[G. David Felt]

Interesting, they need to figure this out fast, maybe buy one of the non-used GM plants and refurbish it to get production going, they could be the next Toyota camry and it truly is way better than toyota.

[Drew Dowdell]

Pretty much nothing they can do from a short term perspective if they are at capacity.

[Cory Wolfe]

I have noticed that the Hyundai dealer is always short on Elantra's. They generally have only 1 or 2 in stock compared to the 15-20 Cruze's that the Chevy dealer has. Despite that, I still see more Elantra's on the road around here. I'd rather have the Cruze, personally.