Kia is asking its dealers to pretty please not mark up its highly anticipated EV9 three-row electric crossover when they get their grubby little hands on it. Right now, it’s set to arrive before the end of the year, and potential EV9 buyers may be worried about steep price hikes on vehicles they’ve already reserved and have been waiting to place an order on, according to Cars Direct. It’s fairly well known throughout the car-buying world that Kia/Hyundai dealers are some of the worst in the entire country.
From the story:
In a letter sent to its dealers on Tuesday, Kia wrote “the EV9 customer is an important new owner to the Kia brand, and price transparency will be paramount as part of their purchase experience. We ask dealers to retail the EV9 without mark-up over the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.”
Cars Direct asserts that this may just be wishful thinking. At the end of the day, dealers determine markups and prices based on supply and demand, and Kia dealers love to mark up car prices. The outlet even found a dealer marking up a Kia Forte to the point it cost more than a Tesla Model 3. There are even reports of the EV6 – the EV9’s smaller electric sibling – being marked up $20,000 above MSRP, according to Cars Direct. That has since changed, and Kia is reportedly offering fairly sizable incentives on EV6s to take advantage of a loophole that allows foreign-built EVs to qualify for a commercial tax credit when leases.
Analysts reportedly say those markups on EV6s were “unavoidable” because of really thin margins between MSRP and invoice prices. There still is no word on an invoice price for the EV9, according to Cars Direct, but it could be possible that Kia wants to take a similar approach with the electric crossover.
This is a good time to remember that the U.S. dealer system is a walking nightmare, and it really should not be this way. There really is not much Kia can do to stop its dealers from going wild on markups, it can only politely ask. What a mess.