There's still a strong market for small cars (in general), depending on your target audience, I think. Many dads initially opt for crossovers or larger SUVs for family needs, but eventually, they often start saving for smaller, more stylish vehicles. It’s only a matter of time before they begin their search for something compact and eye-catching. Have a great Sunday (and a great week ahead), Charlotte and Gabi!
Population is getting older, so it’s not easy to get in and out of small car like Honda Civic. That’s one of the reason you see more and more crossover like again Honda HRV ( high riding vehicle) . Yes , i understand that many gadgets are now standard and we must pay for them. And as you said , we ask for those gadgets and once you get used to them it’s hard rid of them.
Please do the sedan episode! I'm fascinated by the North American obsession with massive vehicles, but don't share that obsession. The K5 and new Sonata are my ideal vehicle. Do you think consumers have also been influenced by manufacturers and advertisers towards the larger vehicles? Making us think we wanted them more all along?
I love my new KIA Sportage PHEV, but I care not at all about status. I like the tech - being able to lock my car at a distance if I notice I have forgotten to do that, starting and stopping charging remotely, all of cameras that warn me what’s around me for safety. It’s performance, not status for me.
I just looked over the bill of sale for my late mother's 2016 Forte LX (not really that long ago) which I now own. MSRP was 18,795CAD, less 3,000 Kia Incentive, less another 500 for Forte Conquest bonus, and there were plenty of them on the lot to choose from for immediate delivery.
I had VW Jetta and Sorento 2019 and no space in the garage, so during the winter, my jetta got rusted in 2 years, while Sorento none. It is because Sorento has higher clearance, and there are pieces of plastics in the bottom. Most small cars are not practical for our winters
Manufacturers had a lot to do with influencing buyers over to CUV/SUV's because they have way better profit margins on them, including the more relaxed safety and fuel economy regulations for trucks. Ford still had a healthy car market in NA when they decided to abandon that market to chase the better profit margins on the trucks. It will only ever be cars for me.
Particularly here in Europe the new cars are so overly expensive due to all the safety features like autonomous braking lane keep assist etc. Honda Fit (Jazz to us) is still popular but nigh on £35k!
You can Google this but in countries with lower regulations (back up camera for one) they have the Elantra (Avante) with no screen - blank with a digital clock and buttons to run it.
2024 Forte or Elantra are good deals. K4 is best bang for your buck for modern tech tho... base has smart key, wireless CarPlay, forward crash sensor (life saver) and more.
I used to have a 2017 Kia Rio. I purchased a 2023 Kia Sorento XLine Edition in black. That is my first S.U.V. I have ever owned. I HATE Crossovers, and cars. P.K.
All my life, I used to buy middle range trim cars, and, tbh, it's worth paying extra for the top trim to enjoy your driving experience, sound quality, etc. For example, my old 2019 Sorento EX trim doesn't have the option to open the trunk using a key or any button. Every time you carry heavy stuff, you need to put it in the wet ground. Or during Covid, you go for pickup parking, and you have to get out physically from your car to open the trunk. Now we 2024 Sorento X-Line-Limited I have the opposite problem, if I stay for few seconds behind the trunk, it will open thoug I don't need it. By the way, how can I turn that off preferrably from my keys?
The bottom line, the more expensive models of all makes have a higher profit margin. Compacts and mid size sedans bring in less profit than the SUV's, crossovers and trucks.
hi gabi and charlotte! i just found a few moments ago a book about trucks as they were made not too long ago (2018)! wish i'd send the book to you and maybe you should try talking about trucks--if kia can make them! there also is a song about you, gabi--it's called gabby's dollhouse (lol)! which car is that in the video?
Unfortunately, in their apparent wisdom Hyundai has chosen to cancel the K5 in Canada. New car time for me in a year and the K5 was a definite front runner for me. Now it's off the table.
I have the 23 kia sportage hybrid that I traveled across country to buy. Now I want to buy a slightly smaller EV cuz I don't need all this space but I don't want a sedan
the compact budget SUVs are coming back, 2024 Trax made record sales as proof. Car companies has gone overboard with low reliability, extremely expensive vehicles such as ford, stellantis, even honda and toyotas, people are waking up already and voting with their wallets. no one is paying $55k for a ford escape or dodge hornet
You are correct vehicles are highly priced, but so wrong in your assessment. Vehicles are just completely overpriced because investors want huge profit margins. Why would a Kia or a Hyundai cost so much money speaking to the brands you represent. And to be fair why is a Toyota Rav 4 reaching 70 thousand dollars Canadian ? For a Rav 4 ? This has nothing to do with size. You spoke about the ford ranger. I am 52 years old. I have been around vehicles my whole life, and even worked as an auto journalist for a second in the 1990s. I left it learning how crooked the industry is. But I digress. Explain to me how a ford F 150 truck is over 150 thousand dollars? Because it has what new tech? A touch screen? Why is a jeep that was designed to be a fun affordable young person vehicle now priced at 80 thousand dollars for a jeep ? And the grand Cherokee hitting 100 thousand dollars? A Ford mustang was a fun sports car that you could buy as a teenager working summer jobs and financing it. Try that today with a ford mustang. I could go on but point made. I understand your need to defend your industry , but it is so poorly rationalized from your incentive driven (pardon the driving pun) perspective to defend your dealership’s livelihood. Your point of safety features raising cost and technology is ignoring so many variables and so oversimplified for your benefit to make a case that this is somehow the consumers fault for wanting quality at a reasonable price. It is all relative. It is 2024 and technology has advanced a lot as we know. In any decade the vehicle you bought was fully loaded in features for its time. The new vehicles today are exponentially disproportionately priced. It is way out of the scope of inflation, or what safety and technology is in the vehicle or the size of a vehicle. The prices across the board are ridiculously overpriced and because of that no one is buying new vehicles, hence your dealership pushing out a video like this making excuses. And you keep speaking to oh well we justify it because people want all the safety features. So. When seatbelts were introduced should car manufacturers have tripled the price because of government safety features of the time? When ABS braking and airbags became standard, it stayed in line with a proportional proper cost for profit . The points you are making are so bias it is maddening. Speaking to the specific profit margin of 800 dollars on a Kia Rio is due to the manufacturer looking for way too much profit and then the dealership has to multiply that to keep the lights on. So really the profit margin issue is created by the manufacturer in the first place. And you even admit they do not make vehicles like they used too. No they do not. But in a bad way they do not. Globalization leads to templated assembly with very little quality checks. Added to that, for Kia and parent company Hyundai, the vehicles you represent are sourced parts wise, crafted, made, especially Korean built vehicles in Korea, on slave labour with cheap parts sourced from Korea. Korean manufacturers make the most profit based on cost relative to any manufacturer. That is why the company became so popular over the last two decades. Budget friendly. Affordable and building into more reliability than rather humble beginnings of poorly built vehicles when it first came to North America. In the 1990s Japanese car manufacturers openly complained to governments in the western world that Korean built vehicles had an unfair advantage using slave labour with slave labour wages. But on top of that Hyundai and Kia doubled down. The second consumer bought the brands a lot more, the slave labour remained, yet Hyundai and Kia were charging the same prices as their Japanese competitors with such higher costs in assembly, research and development and overall costs. Your definition of a car company making money is horrifically disproportionate to a fair profit. The profit margins are way out of control. And cross over vehicles are also very much also out of control in pricing. Again a Tuscon for example has gone through the roof in pricing in just a few years because it became popular as an affordable vehicle. But I guess like you are both saying, the companies just do not make enough profit margin anymore. Why stop at 2 billion for example in profits if you want 3 billion in profit as investors. I understand you are just the messengers looking from your perspective, but how about we revisit that true commerce should dictate competitive pricing with competition and building quality. What ever happened to the good old days of that concept ? Instead it’s all about maximizing profit. I hope consumers continue to realize, like I did way too late, that owning one vehicle for as longest time as possible makes the consumer a winner, and to stop consuming new cars to keep the wealthy even more wealthy in an industry that knows it is too big to fail. It is time for it to truly fail without a bail out. Your videos used to be just reviews and I thought great reviews to get to know the vehicles. These new, look at us hanging out in the back of a trunk as you say at the beginning of the vehicle, is like a political trick that the dealership relates to the average citizen. Look we are just all friends here. Come on guys, like you said for real, there is a reason you do not shoot a video like this in a boardroom or sales managers office. Modern commerce is failing because consumers cannot keep up anymore. It is like that in every industry, but the car industry is going to have to change or totally fail if they do not innovate, and not even joke about blaming the consumers for their wants when shopping. How dare a customer want a faulty priced vehicle built with pride and quality right? Shameful to even joke about that passive aggressively to even suggest it as a narrative. A vehicle is the second biggest purchase besides a home, an average income person will make. Auto manufacturers, all of them, or whoever wants to survive, has to adapt not the consumer adapting to ridiculous pricing. Yes people do want quality and fair pricing. Reduce the profit margins or fail. People just do not have the money anymore. So sorry for the pushback. Clearly this video triggered a response in me to write this response on my iPhone and ramble on for so long. Sorry for any typos. I do like your videos. I do not like a script pushed to consumers that we are at fault because companies want an even larger profit margin. Thank you.
I think KIA should still offer something like the rio, the K3 in manual around 22 000$ would corner the cheap car market; it would be the only economy choice except for the versa and i believe they would sell a lot. Not everyone wants a 40 000$ SUV...Give us options!
Car makers think they know what we want…….they don’t. All the features in new cars is what is driving the prices up. I would say most people use 5% of those features……..proving that car makers don’t know what we want
There's still a strong market for small cars (in general), depending on your target audience, I think. Many dads initially opt for crossovers or larger SUVs for family needs, but eventually, they often start saving for smaller, more stylish vehicles. It’s only a matter of time before they begin their search for something compact and eye-catching.
Have a great Sunday (and a great week ahead), Charlotte and Gabi!
Bought the wife a Santa Fe last month. I'm perfectly happy in my Elantra Sport. I've just never liked large vehicles.
Elantra sport is a really underrated vehicle for sure
Gabi and Charlotte are a winning combination for Kia! I love the product demonstration videos and the videos from the trunks of the cars!
Population is getting older, so it’s not easy to get in and out of small car like Honda Civic. That’s one of the reason you see more and more crossover like again Honda HRV ( high riding vehicle) . Yes , i understand that many gadgets are now standard and we must pay for them. And as you said , we ask for those gadgets and once you get used to them it’s hard rid of them.
Please do the sedan episode! I'm fascinated by the North American obsession with massive vehicles, but don't share that obsession. The K5 and new Sonata are my ideal vehicle. Do you think consumers have also been influenced by manufacturers and advertisers towards the larger vehicles? Making us think we wanted them more all along?
Yes do this please!
I love my new KIA Sportage PHEV, but I care not at all about status. I like the tech - being able to lock my car at a distance if I notice I have forgotten to do that, starting and stopping charging remotely, all of cameras that warn me what’s around me for safety. It’s performance, not status for me.
I just looked over the bill of sale for my late mother's 2016 Forte LX (not really that long ago) which I now own. MSRP was 18,795CAD, less 3,000 Kia Incentive, less another 500 for Forte Conquest bonus, and there were plenty of them on the lot to choose from for immediate delivery.
People don't mind cars, the corolla and model 3 sell just fine. People just don't want cheap junk for 25k when they can have something nice for 30k.
I had VW Jetta and Sorento 2019 and no space in the garage, so during the winter, my jetta got rusted in 2 years, while Sorento none. It is because Sorento has higher clearance, and there are pieces of plastics in the bottom. Most small cars are not practical for our winters
Manufacturers had a lot to do with influencing buyers over to CUV/SUV's because they have way better profit margins on them, including the more relaxed safety and fuel economy regulations for trucks. Ford still had a healthy car market in NA when they decided to abandon that market to chase the better profit margins on the trucks. It will only ever be cars for me.
Thank you charlotte &gabi for today's podcast and have a great sunday to you two. Yeet!!!!!
Particularly here in Europe the new cars are so overly expensive due to all the safety features like autonomous braking lane keep assist etc. Honda Fit (Jazz to us) is still popular but nigh on £35k!
The Rav 4, Civic and several other vehicles were cheap back in the day. They were bought by first time car buyers still in high school.
You can Google this but in countries with lower regulations (back up camera for one) they have the Elantra (Avante) with no screen - blank with a digital clock and buttons to run it.
The GM's Trax is built in Korea - so it is a raised and hatched sedan - FWD only and pretty good pricing.
Except for Jeep Dodge Ram their vehicles are outrageously overpriced they literally have 2023’s sitting on their lots what a joke of a company
2024 Forte or Elantra are good deals. K4 is best bang for your buck for modern tech tho... base has smart key, wireless CarPlay, forward crash sensor (life saver) and more.
I can hear that Canadian accent now!
I remember a brand new Yugo for under $5K USD ? It's awful though... Europe has much smaller vehicles, partly due to price of petrol there...
I used to have a 2017 Kia Rio. I purchased a 2023 Kia Sorento XLine Edition in black. That is my first S.U.V. I have ever owned. I HATE Crossovers, and cars. P.K.
6:45 "the Kia Rio had an $800 profit margin" ... and what are the profit margins like now? *cough cough corporate greed*
Present Miss Gaby and Miss Charlotte 🙋
All my life, I used to buy middle range trim cars, and, tbh, it's worth paying extra for the top trim to enjoy your driving experience, sound quality, etc.
For example, my old 2019 Sorento EX trim doesn't have the option to open the trunk using a key or any button. Every time you carry heavy stuff, you need to put it in the wet ground. Or during Covid, you go for pickup parking, and you have to get out physically from your car to open the trunk.
Now we 2024 Sorento X-Line-Limited I have the opposite problem, if I stay for few seconds behind the trunk, it will open thoug I don't need it. By the way, how can I turn that off preferrably from my keys?
Kia Soul, 3-door, 2-seat hatchback, with a high-mileage, bulletproof diesel, for under $20K.
The bottom line, the more expensive models of all makes have a higher profit margin. Compacts and mid size sedans bring in less profit than the SUV's, crossovers and trucks.
Your tik tok was hilarious, dealers have principles! 😂😂😂😂
There's a reason we're the most in debt country in the world. Everyone loves living beyond their means to "keep up with the joneses".
hi gabi and charlotte! i just found a few moments ago a book about trucks as they were made not too long ago (2018)! wish i'd send the book to you and maybe you should try talking about trucks--if kia can make them! there also is a song about you, gabi--it's called gabby's dollhouse (lol)! which car is that in the video?
The bigger vehicles are nice but looking at those price tags its a no for me
there are no more cheap cars and insurance is thru the roof.
Your specific pick(s) for best value 2025 small crossover?
The Kia K5 is somewhat affordable here in the U.S. 😂
Unfortunately, in their apparent wisdom Hyundai has chosen to cancel the K5 in Canada. New car time for me in a year and the K5 was a definite front runner for me. Now it's off the table.
it's weird because civics and corollas are still some of the best selling cars. how are those so successful but not other small cars?
I have the 23 kia sportage hybrid that I traveled across country to buy. Now I want to buy a slightly smaller EV cuz I don't need all this space but I don't want a sedan
the compact budget SUVs are coming back, 2024 Trax made record sales as proof. Car companies has gone overboard with low reliability, extremely expensive vehicles such as ford, stellantis, even honda and toyotas, people are waking up already and voting with their wallets. no one is paying $55k for a ford escape or dodge hornet
You are correct vehicles are highly priced, but so wrong in your assessment. Vehicles are just completely overpriced because investors want huge profit margins. Why would a Kia or a Hyundai cost so much money speaking to the brands you represent. And to be fair why is a Toyota Rav 4 reaching 70 thousand dollars Canadian ? For a Rav 4 ? This has nothing to do with size. You spoke about the ford ranger. I am 52 years old. I have been around vehicles my whole life, and even worked as an auto journalist for a second in the 1990s. I left it learning how crooked the industry is. But I digress. Explain to me how a ford F 150 truck is over 150 thousand dollars? Because it has what new tech? A touch screen? Why is a jeep that was designed to be a fun affordable young person vehicle now priced at 80 thousand dollars for a jeep ? And the grand Cherokee hitting 100 thousand dollars? A Ford mustang was a fun sports car that you could buy as a teenager working summer jobs and financing it. Try that today with a ford mustang. I could go on but point made. I understand your need to defend your industry , but it is so poorly rationalized from your incentive driven (pardon the driving pun) perspective to defend your dealership’s livelihood. Your point of safety features raising cost and technology is ignoring so many variables and so oversimplified for your benefit to make a case that this is somehow the consumers fault for wanting quality at a reasonable price. It is all relative. It is 2024 and technology has advanced a lot as we know. In any decade the vehicle you bought was fully loaded in features for its time. The new vehicles today are exponentially disproportionately priced. It is way out of the scope of inflation, or what safety and technology is in the vehicle or the size of a vehicle. The prices across the board are ridiculously overpriced and because of that no one is buying new vehicles, hence your dealership pushing out a video like this making excuses. And you keep speaking to oh well we justify it because people want all the safety features. So. When seatbelts were introduced should car manufacturers have tripled the price because of government safety features of the time? When ABS braking and airbags became standard, it stayed in line with a proportional proper cost for profit . The points you are making are so bias it is maddening. Speaking to the specific profit margin of 800 dollars on a Kia Rio is due to the manufacturer looking for way too much profit and then the dealership has to multiply that to keep the lights on. So really the profit margin issue is created by the manufacturer in the first place. And you even admit they do not make vehicles like they used too. No they do not. But in a bad way they do not. Globalization leads to templated assembly with very little quality checks. Added to that, for Kia and parent company Hyundai, the vehicles you represent are sourced parts wise, crafted, made, especially Korean built vehicles in Korea, on slave labour with cheap parts sourced from Korea. Korean manufacturers make the most profit based on cost relative to any manufacturer. That is why the company became so popular over the last two decades. Budget friendly. Affordable and building into more reliability than rather humble beginnings of poorly built vehicles when it first came to North America. In the 1990s Japanese car manufacturers openly complained to governments in the western world that Korean built vehicles had an unfair advantage using slave labour with slave labour wages. But on top of that Hyundai and Kia doubled down. The second consumer bought the brands a lot more, the slave labour remained, yet Hyundai and Kia were charging the same prices as their Japanese competitors with such higher costs in assembly, research and development and overall costs. Your definition of a car company making money is horrifically disproportionate to a fair profit. The profit margins are way out of control. And cross over vehicles are also very much also out of control in pricing. Again a Tuscon for example has gone through the roof in pricing in just a few years because it became popular as an affordable vehicle. But I guess like you are both saying, the companies just do not make enough profit margin anymore. Why stop at 2 billion for example in profits if you want 3 billion in profit as investors. I understand you are just the messengers looking from your perspective, but how about we revisit that true commerce should dictate competitive pricing with competition and building quality. What ever happened to the good old days of that concept ? Instead it’s all about maximizing profit. I hope consumers continue to realize, like I did way too late, that owning one vehicle for as longest time as possible makes the consumer a winner, and to stop consuming new cars to keep the wealthy even more wealthy in an industry that knows it is too big to fail. It is time for it to truly fail without a bail out. Your videos used to be just reviews and I thought great reviews to get to know the vehicles. These new, look at us hanging out in the back of a trunk as you say at the beginning of the vehicle, is like a political trick that the dealership relates to the average citizen. Look we are just all friends here. Come on guys, like you said for real, there is a reason you do not shoot a video like this in a boardroom or sales managers office. Modern commerce is failing because consumers cannot keep up anymore. It is like that in every industry, but the car industry is going to have to change or totally fail if they do not innovate, and not even joke about blaming the consumers for their wants when shopping. How dare a customer want a faulty priced vehicle built with pride and quality right? Shameful to even joke about that passive aggressively to even suggest it as a narrative. A vehicle is the second biggest purchase besides a home, an average income person will make. Auto manufacturers, all of them, or whoever wants to survive, has to adapt not the consumer adapting to ridiculous pricing. Yes people do want quality and fair pricing. Reduce the profit margins or fail. People just do not have the money anymore. So sorry for the pushback. Clearly this video triggered a response in me to write this response on my iPhone and ramble on for so long. Sorry for any typos. I do like your videos. I do not like a script pushed to consumers that we are at fault because companies want an even larger profit margin. Thank you.
because you can buy a good used car for less than a not so good new cheap car.
Mini cooper????
Not cheap
The only new car here in the US under $20,000 is the Mitsubishi Mirage. Terrible car according to a lot of UA-cam reviewers.
Because it is
It's a shame that we don't emulate the Europeans. They have so many inexpensive models that it's hard for them to choose one!
I think KIA should still offer something like the rio, the K3 in manual around 22 000$ would corner the cheap car market; it would be the only economy choice except for the versa and i believe they would sell a lot. Not everyone wants a 40 000$ SUV...Give us options!
The problem is that people don't buy them. They want all the fancy features and then whine that it costs money.
Car makers think they know what we want…….they don’t. All the features in new cars is what is driving the prices up. I would say most people use 5% of those features……..proving that car makers don’t know what we want