Hyundai has cut back on daily rental and has stopped dealers from self-registering cars in order to boost residual values, according to UK president Tony Whitehorn.
Speaking to BusinessCar at the Paris motor show, Whitehorn said: “We are purposefully trying to reduce the amount of rental vehicles we do, it’s expensive and you pay for it. Secondly, when you put a lot of vehicles into one end user, understandably, they have to liquidate those vehicles simultaneously [which impacts RVs], but if you put them into lots of individual users then they come back at different times. Rental is good for exposure, but for disposal timing they put them into the market when they want to.”
The move to boost Hyundai residual values could be used to lower monthly lease rates or to counter any price rises forced by a weakening Pound.
Whitehorn added: “We have focused the dealer network on retail vehicles. So our incentive scheme is only for retail vehicles. The whole strategy about that is that it reduces self registrations. If they self register they don’t get any bonus.
“So we don’t get that many self-registered cars, in fact the number is dramatically down on last year.”
Whitehorn also said that Hyundai hopes to hit 92,500 cars this year: “Last year we did 88,000. Next year is an interesting one. We’ve got the SMMT who are saying the market is going to be down by as much as 6%. We’ve got Global Insight saying the market could be down as much as 9% and you’ve got us, internally, saying it’s going to be down 2% or flat.
“SMMT and Global Insight gave their figures just after Brexit so there was the shock element.
“For use we should be at about 93,000, just up on this year, due to new product.”