- Sales of Hyundai EVs jumped 33 percent in the first half of 2024, while hybrid deliveries grew by 39 percent.
- The brand’s overall performance was less impressive, growing by just 1.2 percent to 399,523.
- The Elantra sedan took a 17 percent hit and the Santa Cruz pickup was down 10 percent.
Hyundai has just released its half-year US sales figures for 2024, and the numbers are at the same time good, bad and ho-hum. There’s positive news on the EV front, but some of the brand’s stalwarts are struggling to hook buyers in like they used to.
Overall sales climbed 2.2 percent this past quarter, but by only 1.2 percent in the first six months of this year to 399,523, which is a far less impressive result than achieved by Toyota, who enjoyed a near-15 percent uplift in the same period. But that modest growth figure doesn’t reveal some of the solid work done by individual models, in particular the brand’s electric cars and crossovers, whose sales swelled by a third.
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Deliveries of the Ioniq 5, for instance, grew a massive 37 percent to 18,728 despite the model having been around for so long now that Hyundai has facelifted the jumbo hatch for 2025. The Ioniq 6 puts on an even better on-paper show, its first-half sales exploding 113 percent to 6,912, though it’s worth noting that the 6 wasn’t available for all of H1, 2023, and that the more conventional Elantra sedan found almost 10 times as many buyers.
But the Elantra can’t afford to gloat because its sales slid 17 percent to 62,289, and it wasn’t the only combustion-powered Hyundai to hit the skids. Sales of the Santa Cruz light truck fell by 10 percent to 17,945, the Tuscson was down 8 percent to 92,146 and the Venue sank 18 percent to 13,371.
Saving the ICE models’ blushes were models like the Sonata, which bucked the anti-sedan trend and posted a 14 percent sales upswing, and the big Palisade. Its sales climbed 36 percent, helping SUVs grab 75 percent of Hyundai’s total US sales.
The hydrogen-fuelled Nexo (pictured below) struggled, its sales numbers showing a 27 percent drop. The green SUV was only sold in California, where the number of refuelling stations has recently been reduced after Shell opted to close many of them. But Hyundai isn’t giving up on the Nexo, and will launch an all-new model in 2025.
