Sorento

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Kia
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SUV

It's a new year and a new decade, and South Korea's Hyundai Motor Group is wasting no time as it takes steps to "secur[e] its future industrial leadership," in the words of Executive Vice Chairman Euisun Chung. And here, leadership necessarily includes electrified vehicles, which experienced a tremendous surge in relevance industry-wide in the past year, attracting some high-dollar investment announcements and experiencing several high-profile battery-electric vehicle reveals.

Accordingly, Hyundai this week announced that it will invest some $87 billion USD into powertrain electrification, mobility, and other areas of future growth. The group's electrification investments will put 44 hybrid and electric vehicle models on the road by 2025 - up from 24 in 2019.

Battery-electric vehicles are the largest category of that push, representing 23 of the 44 planned electrified models - up from nine BEVs in 2019. The group's first dedicated BEV will launch in 2021, followed by another ten dedicated BEV over the following four years, and an all-new EV architecture will arrive to underpin some number of those models by 2024.

Meanwhile, conventional and plug-in hybrid versions of some of the group's hot-selling crossovers - namely, the Kia Sorento, Hyundai Santa Fe, and Hyundai Tucson - are slated to hit the market this year. Conventional hybrids will represent 13 of the group's 44 electrified models come 2025, and six of the vehicles will be plug-in hybrids. The remaining two models will be hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

Yet, there is some confusion surrounding the timing of the Hyundai Motor Group's planned EV architecture launch, as previous reports put the arrival of Hyundai's global modular EV platform at early-2021. That's the same year that the sleek, battery-electric Kia Imagine concept is slated to reach production on a dedicated BEV platform.

Regardless, the Hyundai Motor Group is gunning for 560,000 pure-electric vehicle sales annually by 2025, which is a more attainable goal than many of the company's competitors have set for themselves.