Kia and Hyundai plan Aussie technical centre
Durability, 4x4 and APAC training would be focuses for Sydney centre of excellenceThe Hyundai Motor Group is investigating the establishment of an Australian technical development centre.
The project has been given added impetus by the deep Australian involvement in the development of the Kia Tasman ute.
Expected to be set up in Sydney, the facility and its capabilities would be available for use by HMG’s three locally-represented brands; Hyundai, Genesis and Kia.
While the exact nature of the work the centre would do hasn’t been publicly detailed, a focus on durability, rough road, off-road and 4x4 capabilities seem certain to be part of its scope.
Another key responsibility would be training of staff for the Asia-Pacific region.
An Australian tech centre would also help Kia and Hyundai market themselves as local brands; both are on sales drives to cement themselves among the country’s top-sellers.
The Tasman is intrinsic to Kia Australia’s ambitions to top 100,000 sales annually. The 20,000 annual sales forecast for Australia are also critical to the ute program’s global viability.
Kia Australia CEO Damien Meredith told carsales the project proposal had been “formalised” – meaning it has been pitched up the management chain to Korea – and that the concept had emerged from his management group.
“The team came together and come up with ideas about what requirements we would need to develop the business in Australia,” he said. “That [technical centre] was one of them.”
He described the technical centre as a “medium term” (three-to-five-year) ambition.
“Because we are in Asia-Pacific we have got a monster responsibility from a volume point of view. We are nearly 50 per cent of the total volume out of Asia-Pacific.
“So we have a responsibility there, and one of the responsibilities is to bring along the distributors that work in the Asia-Pacific, because there are only ourselves and a few others that are fully-owned subsidiaries.
“For us to really develop the brand in the Asia-Pacific we need a centre of excellence from a technical point of view to drag that long.
“So that’s one of our medium term goals to get that done.”
Kia Australia has had a policy of localising the ride, handling and steering set-ups of its new models; a practise it’s maintained since 2010. Hyundai rolled back a similar program a few years ago, though Aussie engineers are involved earlier in the chassis development phase at a global level.
Both brand’s also conduct hot weather testing on future models in Australia.
But the Tasman program has taken the co-operation between Kia Australia with the factory in South Korea to a whole new level.
“We learned every single nuance of the departments that are within [HMG’s] Namyang technical centre,” Kia Australia product planning general manager Roland Rivero said.
“There are actually numerous departments within Namyang we’d never had to work that closely with before. We’d never had to do water wading, we’d never had to do side-by-side accessory development.
“That interaction across a broader scope of the Namyang R&D team was very refreshing. And each of those research groups both sides of the fence learned something new.
“We were mucking around with competitor cars, we were mucking around with prototypes and there were learnings from both sides of the fence.”
Asked his view on the establishment of a technical centre, Hyundai Australia CEO Don Romano was cautious.
“I haven’t had enough information to be able to evaluate that properly,” he said. “But I would say overall, the more we do in Australia for Australians, the better.”
The HMG plan has some parallels with Toyota, which classifies Australia as a centre of excellence for its development and validation of 4x4 models such as LandCruiser, Prado and Hilux.
It has a base at the Anglesea proving ground for vehicle testing, as well as a facility within Toyota’s Altona campus in Melbourne.
Chinese manufacturer, GWM, also recently announced it has become a permanent resident at the Lang Lang proving ground in Victoria as part of its plan to upgrade the dynamics of its vehicles locally. But all these efforts pale into significance compared to Ford, which has the biggest design and engineering footprint in Australia as the homeroom for the T6 platform and the Ranger ute and Everest SUV.
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