Hyundai Motor UK ended 2025 with the kind of numbers that turn a strategy into a statement of success.
More than 93,100 vehicles registered, a 4.6% market share and a climb to sixth place in the UK market, three positions higher year-on-year.
For president Ashley Andrew, the headline is not just scale, but shape: alternative fuel vehicles made up 58% of Hyundai’s UK sales mix in 2025, and EV volumes grew by more than 10% on the back of the crossover Kona Electric SUV and the arrival of the budget-focused electric city car Inster.
The momentum matters because 2026 is shaping up as a year of pace. The Korean car maker is pushing an expanding electric line-up alongside hybrids and plug-in hybrids, with a product plan that is deliberately busy.
“Over the next 18 months, we’re looking at refreshing our whole product range, and we’ve got five new models being introduced,” Andrew says.
That full refresh will feed directly into the less glamorous but commercially decisive levers: residual value performance and monthly affordability.
“In terms of the innovation in the product, we have a very strong portfolio of residual values. Our average residual values are now 48%, some of the strongest in the industry,” he says.
The constant churn of updates has a structural benefit too. “With our speed of new product introduction, we typically get new Cap Codes for the mid-cycle refresh and the introduction of a new model, so we’ve always got this refresh in terms of strong residual values. That helps us with trade-cycle management and our finance sales.”
EV growth: Inster, Kona and the grant effect
If there was a single moment that captured Hyundai’s 2025 timing, it was Inster landing into a market suddenly primed for price signals.
The Government’s Electric Car Grant announcement last July arrived as the small city car was hitting the market, and Andrew says the business moved quickly to translate that into something customers could feel immediately.
“We knew initially there was a process to go through to find out which vehicles were eligible and which vehicles weren’t,” he says. “But we thought we’d seize the initiative and put our own electric car grant against Inster as a launch offer. That proved incredibly successful in capturing the fact that a grant was available, even though it was fully funded by us.”
Hyundai’s new Kona Electric has since secured eligibility for the Government’s band 2 £1,500 ECG, making it the first model from the brand to qualify for the scheme. Hyundai has also confirmed that its own grant would remain available across the wider electric range until March 31. This offers £3,750 off all Inster models and £1,500 off Ioniq 5, Ioniq 5 N, Ioniq 6, Ioniq 6 N and Ioniq 9.
Incentives, however, are never just about a registration spike. The future of Hyundai’s Electric Car Grant offer, launched in July 2025 and continuing into 2026, is framed by Andrew as a balancing act across multiple variables: volume, mix, residual values, and regulatory risk.
For Andrew, the question is not “does it sell cars”, but “does it support a healthy business case”. “It’s all of those factors,” he says. “It’s where our residual values are relative to our competitors. It’s where our volume is and our mix of electric vehicles.”
He is blunt about the wider context too. “Our challenge with the government ZEV mandate is to make sure that we’re not in a position where we’re at risk of paying the £12,000 a unit penalty, so you have to put all those factors together and continually review the business case.”
N as a halo: turning performance into N Line volume
While Inster gave the brand a fresh, accessible EV proposition, at the other end of the spectrum Hyundai’s 2025 story also included a halo and a heavyweight. The range-topping Ioniq 9 SUV, which launched later in the year, did something different: it built an order bank that carries into 2026.
Then there is performance, and specifically the role of N in an electric era that still has to persuade sceptics it can be fun. Andrew points to the reception for Ioniq 5 N – the high-performance, all-electric version of the popular Ioniq 5 – as a marker of what a properly engineered halo can do. “The plaudits and accolades were unprecedented,” he says. “It’s the only EV that Autocar has ever awarded a five-star award.”
That is also why Hyundai has leaned into experiences designed to put the car in front of people who are not totally convinced by EV as a performance candidate.
A partnership with MotorSport Vision, led by former F1 driver Jonathan Palmer, is part of that strategy, giving Hyundai a way to put its high-performance EV in a setting where the audience is there for driving first and powertrain second.
“We entered into the partnership because we’d seen it work really well with another manufacturer, and we had N and it was the perfect platform to put a high-performance EV into an environment where we knew it would get exposed to a lot of petrolheads who love performance driving,” Andrew says.
He says drivers get to handle an N and soon discover it is possibly the most potent thing they will get to drive all day. It becomes, in his words, a live demonstration of “technology, driving dynamics and innovation”, and a rebuttal to the idea that EVs are less engaging.
The emotional side of N, he argues, is not just about selling the halo car itself. It is about what that halo does for the broader range.
“The fundamental success of N is what it does for us with N Line,” Andrew says, referring to the sporty trim level that bridges the gap between standard Hyundai models and the full-performance N models. “It’s the classic situation: the heart wants the N, the head buys the N Line.”
He points to familiar precedents in the industry and says Hyundai sees the same pattern already with N Line versions of Tucson and Kona and expects it again when Ioniq 3 arrives. “When Ioniq 3 launches, we think N Line will be the heart of the proposition,” he says.
Tucson transition models, keeping the core strong
For all the noise around EVs, the brand’s centre of gravity in the UK remains Tucson, which accounted for 31% of Hyundai sales in 2025. The challenge is to protect that strength without allowing the mix to become overly dependent on one nameplate – and without slowing the shift to electrification.
Hyundai’s plan is straightforward: keep Tucson fresh, keep it accessible, and keep it financially competitive. “Tucson is the gravity of the brand in terms of mid-sized SUV,” Andrew says. “The way we protect it is to have a new Tucson coming over the next 18 months.”
Between now and the next-generation model, Hyundai plans a series of transition models to keep the proposition moving. “Because of the volume we do in Tucson, we will this year refresh it,” Andrew says. The intention is a mix of sharper price points and richer equipment in the middle and upper grades, with one clear goal.
“It will enable us to get a better combination of list price and residual value, enabling more accessible monthly payments,” he says. It also creates a reason to speak to existing owners at exactly the right time to offer a new proposition before the new model is introduced.
Fewer, bigger, better partners to boost dealer economics
The retailer network is the other pillar of Hyundai’s UK plan, and it is being reshaped in a way Andrew insists is about strengthening, not shrinking.
Hyundai has stated an intention to reduce the number of retail partners from around 70 to around 55 by 2029, while maintaining, and ultimately increasing, the number of showroom locations.
Andrew describes it as a “fewer, bigger, better” strategy that gives the strongest investors room to grow, and the economics to do it properly.
“It’s designed to give our strongest investors the ability to grow scale with the brand and at the same time reduce costs,” he says. Scale allows groups to centralise functions like accounting, marketing and used car buying, spreading overheads across more sites.
It also helps brand partners recruit and retain talent by creating clearer career pathways within larger organisations.
Crucially, the new sites Hyundai wants are not just shinier. They need space, especially for used cars. Here, Andrew points to a striking 2025 data point: among the top 10 biggest brands in the UK, Hyundai was the fastest-growing used car brand in the UK vehicle parc. In his view, the opportunity to benefit from that has sometimes been constrained by physical capacity.
“There’s a real profit potential in terms of used cars, one that I think historically we’ve probably not been able to exploit, because our sites have been not big enough and constrained in terms of used car space,” he says. The expectation for future facilities is explicit. “One of our requirements is that dealer partners have the space to enable them to do a 2:1, used to new ratio.”
Used cars, aftersales: profit shifts in the next 3-5 years
That used car emphasis is not accidental. Andrew believes the economics of the next three to five years will tilt further toward used vehicles.
“Network profitability has to come from used cars,” he says. Aftersales will still matter, but the mix will change. “While aftersales might go from being dependent on mechanical to far more in terms of software upgrades, there’s still tyres, wearables, Smart Repairs. There’s lots of other ancillary revenue areas that the networks are moving towards.”
Hyundai’s position in used cars is strengthened, Andrew argues, by two structural advantages. The first is supply. During the global chip crisis which occurred between 2020 and 2023, triggered by COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and a surge in demand for electronics, Hyundai – as a vertically structured car maker – was one of the manufacturers least affected. Today, that means the four- to five-year-old parc is comparatively healthy now, just as that cohort becomes prime used stock.
The second is the fact that Hyundai has been selling electrified products in meaningful volume for a long time. “Our first Ioniq was both electric, hybrid and plug-in hybrid,” Andrew says, “and that was launched in 2016, so that’s 10 years of a used car portfolio which is dominated by an alternative fuel product.”
Tucson as a SUV which launched in 2021 with multiple powertrains adds another deep seam of desirable used stock as consumer demand slowly shifts toward electrified powertrains.
Workshop automation, health checks and warranty
The same logic sits behind Hyundai’s focus on the ownership experience, with its warranty package, health checks and approved used programme designed to keep customers inside the ecosystem.
Andrew points to technology that makes the service journey more transparent and more convenient. Hyundai’s workshop automation system, he says, gives customers real-time updates, digital health checks and menu pricing, with the ability for customers to authorise work electronically and even pay monthly for repairs.
The aim is to make the workshop feel less like a black box and more like a modern service transaction, while also supporting retailer productivity. “We are unique by doing that,” he says, adding that larger dealer groups often ask if they can roll the platform across their other franchises. “We say no, because it’s licensed to us.”
Genesis UK: premium partners with capability
Alongside Hyundai, Andrew also has the premium Genesis brand in his remit in the UK, and he describes its recent shift from a direct-to-consumer approach to retailer partners on an agency agreement as a necessary step in scaling.
In the early days, he says, Genesis needed tight control of the brand identity through stored to introduce itself properly.
But to grow into fleet and broader UK sales channels, it needs retail expertise so the strategy is to appoint 15 to 20 sites in highly populated parts of the UK, with retailer partners who have premium experience and the confidence to handle part exchanges at scale.
Andrew says interest is strong. “We have more demand than we are currently looking to appoint sites,” he notes, outlining a focus on groups with fleet connections and experience in leasing and salary sacrifice channels. Partnerships already include Lithia in the UK, Brindley Group and Richmond Motor Group among others, with discussions ongoing with other multi-brand groups.
Product mix that is defensible, profitable
Ask Andrew what success looks like over the next year and he goes straight to product. A full year of Ioniq 9 is top of the list, with Ioniq 6 N expected to broaden the N story beyond a single hero car.
And Ioniq 3, he suggests, could become a new kind of sweet spot: affordable, European in flavour, and perfectly suited to the N Line formula that turns aspiration into volume. That model is expected to make its official debut in April at Milan Design Week, with a UK launch and first deliveries likely in the second half of 2026.
The ambition for 2026, in other words, is not simply to grow, but to grow with a mix that is defensible, profitable, and increasingly electrified, without letting the brand’s foundations drift out of view.
