Wolverton, Ontario, isn’t big enough to even be considered a town, but the hamlet currently has enough Kias to serve an entire province. That’s because the automaker has been letting new cars pile up at a lot it owns there. Shockingly, many of the vehicles it’s storing have already been sold, but it doesn’t plan to deliver them until at least the new year.
Instead, as a leaked dealer presentation outlines, Kia Canada plans to simply leave the new vehicles there in an attempt to game its sales figures in the last six weeks of the year. One of many such lots across Canada, it’s leaving customers frustrated, and it’s costing dealer employees a lot of money.
“With the global slow-down, Kia Canada wants to control wholesale and retail performance in 2023 to not show high over-achievement,” said Vince Capicotto, Kia Canada central region manager, in a video obtained by the CBC. “There’s a high risk with over performance that Kia headquarters will not provide Kia Canada resources necessary in our budget for 2024 to have a successful year if we over perform for the balance of 2023 at too high a rate.”
Read: 2023 Is Kia’s Best Year Ever In America As Brand Achieves Record Sales
Capicotto explained that Kia Canada had already hit its 2023 target of selling 84,000 vehicles, and that if it kept going, the head office might cut back on marketing support. Kia did not immediately respond to our request for comment, but told the CBC that it was working to ensure timely delivery of customer orders in 2023 and beyond.
The move is particularly frustrating to Canadian Kia buyers, many of whom have been waiting months, even years to get their new vehicles. For example, Brian Olmstead said he has been waiting since 2022 for his new Kia EV6.
“I’ve been waiting for a car for a year and a half and they’re holding them on a compound just to make the sales look lower? What the hell?” Olmstead told the CBC. “This is so disappointing. What they’re doing is wrong.”
And dealers aren’t happy about it either. For one thing, they’re fielding calls from frustrated customers, some of whom have been waiting for so long that they’re simply canceling their orders for vehicles that may already be in the country. Even if customers hold onto their orders, dealers’ commissions are being delayed, since they don’t receive them until the vehicles they sold are delivered.
That may sour Kia’s reputation in the nation, since its customers already face some of the longest wait times in the industry, according to Shari Prymak, a senior consultant with Car Help Canada.
“There might be some valid reasoning behind [the plan] from Kia Canada’s perspective,” he said. “But ultimately it’s not right to make customers wait even longer when they’ve already been waiting for so long and dealing with quite a bit of frustration.”
