Biggest Kia means big business

KIA Australia’s new EV9 electric upper-large SUV has a big price tag and will net the company more than $10,000,000 in sales per month, based on the current volume plans.

The EV9 seven-seat electric SUV starts from $97,000 before on-road costs and tops out at $121,000 + ORC – meaning the brand would need to move six Picanto compact hatchbacks to match the revenue generated by every top-spec EV9.

Kia Australia has confirmed that it will have less of a bottleneck for supply of the new model than with its first purpose-built electric car, the EV6, which has been on sale since February 2022. 

The staggered roll-out of that range will not be replicated with the EV9, despite the fact that the brand is initially launching with the Air entry-level model and the top-spec GT-Line, with the mid-range Earth variant due to arrive locally by the end of 2023.

Speaking at the recent EV9 launch, Kia Australia chief operating officer Dennis Piccoli said the brand is expecting an early trend towards the top-spec model, as is common with new-generation products – especially early adopters of electric cars.

“Through the life of the car, ultimately I think we will see what's happening with EV6 … pretty evenly spread with a little bit of a skew towards that middle range,” Mr Piccoli predicted.

On the topic of supply, Mr Piccoli said customer deliveries and dealer stock of the EV9 are “arriving as we speak”.

“The current volume plan that we have for the car is around 100 a month, or 1200 a year. Availability will certainly be better than it was when we launched EV6, because it was hand-to-mouth there and we were effectively selling 30, 40, 50 units a month. It's only started to ramp up now as availability has improved.

“With EV9, our expectation is availability will be better, and we think that we can get to 100 a month in terms of availability from the get go,” he said, adding that the initial batch of “a couple of hundred” made it likely that all 137 Kia dealers around the country “will have a car pretty much from launch”.

Exact wait times for specific models are unknown – Mr Piccoli suggested that there will be some stock ordered to meet market expectations, but more tailored choices may take longer.

“That will depend on the colour and what they're after. If it happens to be an Earth our expectation is that it will be available around December. It depends on the model and variant, but I think availability will be okay. 

“The expectation is 100 a month, and I think the factory is quite supportive. We've been lobbying pretty hard over the last year or two to try and improve supply of EVs, and that seems to be coming to fruition and we can see that in our sales reporting coming through now where EV6 has had a couple of good months,” said Mr Piccoli.

“So it should be, I think, within three to four months here that customers should be able to pick up their car, in most parts,” he said of the order-to-delivery lead-time.

The EV6 had its best month yet in Australia in August, with 243 deliveries, followed by another strong 220 units in October. 

The year-to-date tally for the EV6 stands at 1367 over the first 10 months, ahead of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 (806) and Ioniq 6 (468), but behind the likes of the Polestar 2 (1867) and the big-selling Tesla Model 3 (15,718).