Bad Timing Award, 2008 Edition

Kia Motors, the Korean car company, has just launched an ad campaign to tout their newest model, a V-8 powered SUV called the Borrenga. The tagline of the ads are that you’re not surprised when a luxury SUV is advertised with various clichés (show the car going off-road, show a symphony orchestra to suggest the harmony of the ride, etc.), but you will be surprised when you see the Kia name badge on the front grille. This is Kia’s attempt to move into the luxury segment of the car market.

Car companies don’t make the decision to do this kind of platform launch lightly. It takes years to develop these vehicles. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to build the tooling and production processes involved in a totally new car. Just the budget for the TV advertising alone can run upwards of $20 million.

It’s just a shame that they have come to the culmination of this process just in time to watch the market for big SUV’s crash and burn. Too bad, so sad, sucks to be Kia Motors.

I bring this up by way of pointing out that the domestic automotive manufacturers were not alone in their plans to continue selling large numbers of big cars in the North American market. The American car companies have gotten a lot of bad press because of their overreliance on pickup trucks and SUV’s. But for fifteen years the best selling vehicle in America was the Ford F-150 pickup. What would you expect Ford to do, stop making them?

Even Toyota, probably the best car company in the world, got hammered by the shift in the market. They built the brand new San Antonio assembly plant in 2006 to build the Tundra full size truck. Because sales fell off so much, Toyota has closed the plant for three months this summer while they work off inventories. They were building another plant in Tupelo, Mississippi to build trucks. It now looks like that plant will be retooled to build hybrid Priuses.

A number of commentators have written about how the government should have forced the manufacturers to raise the average mileage on the cars they sell. As if it should be illegal to sell a car that gets less than 30 miles to the gallon.

It’s not like the car companies didn’t offer fuel efficient vehicles for sale, because they all do. Even Ford, GM, and Chrysler. But they kept making full size vehicles because that’s what we wanted. That is why all of the car companies kept developing full size cars and trucks, including Kia.

Being able to buy what we want, and being able to make what people want to buy. It’s a little concept that I like to call freedom.