America’s love for Korean Hyundai! WSJ explores the reason why Hyundai is a hit in the US…

September 14, 2009 at 8:43 pm

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Today’s WSJ had a nice article about the Korean Automaker, explaining what makes it a successful car in the US.   Worth a read..

….The leading Korean car company’s name rhymes with the first day of the week, as in “Hyundai, Bloody Hyundai.” Which is pretty much what the company’s competitors are saying to themselves these days about Hyundai’s remarkable success over the past few years.

Last year Hyundai’s global sales bucked the industry’s decline and rose 5% to 4.2 million cars and trucks. Even in the U.S., the world’s most competitive car market, Hyundai’s sales rose 0.8% in the first eight months of this year, while Ford’s sales dropped 25% in the same period and GM’s plunged 35%. The major Japanese auto makers suffered declines between 25% and 30%.

Hyundai’s success stems from a sustained corporate effort at reinvention—the very same word General Motors is using to describe its mission these days. The Hyundai story should provide GM with a road map.

For years, Hyundai enjoyed a protected home market in Korea. This ensured its prosperity there, but the lack of competition meant the company didn’t develop the product quality or consistency to compete effectively in international markets. The result: Hyundai’s initial U.S. success in 1986 was undercut quickly by quality problems.

A decade ago, Hyundai acquired Kia, a victim of a mid-1990s shakeout in the Korean auto industry. It also established a new quality-control division charged with boosting reliability by emulating Toyota’s vaunted manufacturing methods. To allay lingering concerns over quality, Hyundai put warranties of 10 years or 100,000 miles on vehicles sold in America.

Their campaign began to show results, and the big breakthrough came in 2004, when Hyundai tied Honda for second place in the prestigious J.D. Power & Co. Initial Quality Survey. Also that year, Hyundai completed its first U.S. assembly plant, near Montgomery, Ala.

On the marketing front, last January the Hyundai division launched an innovative “Assurance Program” in the U.S.: Buyers return their cars if they lose their job within a year after their purchase. The offer generated buzz and resonated with the public, as Hyundai’s recent U.S. sales results demonstrate, even though buyers have turned in fewer than 50 cars under the program, which continues through year-end.

…..Both U.S. companies will have to make their marketing more relevant. Hyundai’s 10-year warranties and the “Assurance Program” succeeded because they addressed specific customer concerns—the former about the brand’s reliability, the latter about the economic environment…….

Click here to read the entire article.

Hyundai Vs Ford Vs GM: What Car Payment Protection Plan’s Best?

March 31, 2009 at 6:22 pm

((Source: Jalopnik)

The Carpocalypse has forced automakers to try and entice nervous buyers by offering to remove the burden of a car payment should consumers lose their jobs or worse. But which plan’s the best?

Hyundai was first on the “car payment protection” scene with their Hyundai Assurance Program, followed today by Ford and GM with their Ford Advantage and GM Total Confidence plans, respectively.

All three plans on their own are pretty confusing. Combined, all three are just a mess of different offerings of help in case you lose your job. Each offers different results for different scenarios. So, in order to make this understandable, we’ve broken down each plan and their specific option sets to allow you an opportunity to determine which will work best for you.

For starters, all three programs offer some combination of two different types of help for people facing a personal economic crisis: negative equity coverage and payment assistance. Let’s define some of these terms:

Equity: The amount of investment in an asset.

Negative Equity:This is when the amount owed on something is greater than the total value of the asset itself. In terms of cars, this means you owe more on the car than the car itself is actually worth. This is the opposite of positive equity. Positive equity would be when you have a car and you owe $2,000 but it is worth $9,000 on the used car market. In this case, you probably shouldn’t try to turn it in. Instead, if you’re smart, you’ll just sell it.

Negative Equity Coverage: This is a form of coverage that depending on the level provided, allows you to be forgiven up to a certain amount of monies still remaining in payments on the car. Each plan is different, ranging from several thousand dollars to zero.

Payment Assistance: Assuming you lose your job, the automaker will either take over payment for a certain period of time or payback the lender.

Click here to read the wonderful analysis from our friends @ Jalopnik.  

For those who are impatient and wait, the winner is Hyundai (there are a lot of caveats to this selection).  You are better advised to read the whole analysis before starting to agree with the result.  For those who are absolutely impatient and can’t wait to read the elaborate analysis here is the summary of comparision.