Kia is to look at launching electric vans into the UK market following the announcement of its Plan S strategy, which has seen it commit to launching 14 battery electric vehicles worldwide by 2027.
As part of this plan, the manufacturer will develop and launch electric Purpose Built Vehicles (PBVs), with the first mid-size models expected in 2025.
These will be available in a selection of body styles, which would allow the PBV to fulfil roles as either a van or a ride-hailing passenger shuttle.
John Hargreaves, general manager for fleet and remarketing at Kia UK, told Fleet News at CCIA: “Kia is an ambitious company and doesn’t want to leave stones unturned in any part of the market, but it doesn’t want to play at things either.
“There is a plan in the very long-term to look at having a range over here. But the plan is not to get in a situation where we just have one van that a few of the dealers give lip service to.
“It’s a complex market and to do it, you need to go into it wholeheartedly to accept the fact that you need to change quite a few things if you’re going to do it properly.
“Launching a van is not just like you’re adding a car to the range, it’s totally different.
“We would need to have a dealer network that can provide the aftersales coverage that would be needed.”
10% fleet market share
Kia has been riding high this year with around a 10% share of the fleet market, which Hargreaves admits is “not our natural place to be”.
He says its performance is down to a number of reasons, including the right products, good supply of vehicles and a stable fleet team and set of fleet policies.
“We are now starting to see the real benefits of that,” adds Hargreaves. He said Kia’s consistent fleet strategy involved being in all the fleet sectors to a limited, controlled degree, rather than concentrating on one particular part of the market.
He added: “For example, we’ve never been a big player in daily rental but we have we have largely done the same as we’ve always done, and stuck to our plan and volume.
“So although we have not done all that many in raw numbers, we’ve done substantially more than some manufacturers who have traditionally been really big players in that market.
“Our market share for that segment has increased, even though numerically we haven’t really done that many more.
“Likewise in Motability. We’ve always seen Motability as something which should be a similar type of share level to retail and we’ve kept with that while lots of manufacturers chose to scale back even though in previous years they have been very active in it.
“If we look at standard corporate fleet, which is the area where we’re doing best relative to our overall fleet performance, the electric cars have really helped us and the increase in salary sacrifice has been a big thing.”
Large order banks
Looking ahead, Kia has “very large order banks for some of its cars”, but is now starting to see some supply challenges.
Hargreaves said: “We will be attempting to control some of the fleet channels a little bit more because we do not want to get in a position where we have orders with no realistic chance of supplying them in a sensible time frame.
“We are going to try to take some of the heat out but at the same time we will keep a presence in all those markets. We will not be doing no rental, we’ll just be doing a little less over the rest of year; we won’t be pulling out of Motability, we will probably have fewer models on offer.
“The ethos for us is to be consistently present, but possibly scaled back a little bit for the rest of the year.
“It’s a great position that we’re in. I think we’ll end the year certainly near the top of the fleet market, but whether we sustain the 10% we currently have remains to be seen.”
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Andrew Ryan is the features editor at Fleet News. He has been a journalist for more than 20 years and has specialised in the fleet industry for the past 12.
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