Hyundai Canada CEO Don Romano is quick to admit the auto industry needs to change. Dealerships are too focused on wearing customers down in pursuit of a sale; governments need to tighten some regulations; and a tariff war won’t stop the polar ice caps from melting. 

Hyundai is an outlier in the auto industry—and Canada is an outlier within Hyundai. The South Korean automaker rose to become the world’s No. 3 automaker in 2022, as well a top-three EV maker in the U.S., while many rivals suffered from supply-chain shortages. But it has been Canada that helped lead Hyundai’s growing focus on North America, said Romano. 

Canada was Hyundai’s first market in North America, and remains its fourth-largest market around the world. While automakers like Ford and Volkswagen are skipping this year’s Canadian International Auto Show, which kicks off Friday in Toronto, Hyundai has flown in executives from South Korea for the global auto-show debut of its RN22e electric sports car, which it calls its “rolling lab” for future innovation.

“Our brand has a much higher rating in Canada than it does in other countries,” Romano said in an interview on the sidelines of the auto show Thursday.  “We were early into electrification. … I think that’s changing perceptions of the brand. 

“[The public is] looking at the future, looking at emissions. Our ice caps are melting—what are we going to do about it?” 

He’s had Canadian dealers invest over a billion dollars on upgrades, a lot of it on software. The revamp, a decade in the making, has paid dividends. In 2022, Canada’s overall new-auto sales fell more than nine per cent to the lowest levels since 2009. While Hyundai-Kia sales overall fell 11.3 per cent, its Genesis brand saw sales rise nearly 26 per cent—blowing away the next-biggest growth rates at General Motors and Stellantis, which each eked out just 4.8 per cent in sales growth, according to DeRosiers Automotive Consultants. 

“As an industry … we don’t put enough time into going through the way in which the vehicle operates. We spend more time on your financing, more time on your extended warranties. 

“We can do a lot of that online,” he said, “so your delivery experience wasn’t sitting in front of somebody grinding you for an extra 10 bucks.” 

Here’s more from The Logic’s conversation with Romano, condensed and edited for clarity:

Some drivers are nervous they won’t be tech-savvy enough for these early versions of in-vehicle software. How are your dealers walking people through it?

It’s new. Everything new is usually met with a little resistance. It feels a little complicated, kind of like when we went to smartphones.  We actually have a delivery app. When the car’s been delivered, it goes through every aspect of the vehicle and its software. The customer at least gets, let’s call it, Software 101. 

These cars are connected—we’re also receiving information on an ongoing basis on how the car’s performing. So our goal is to catch any potential issue before it’s an issue. If you hit something on the road, you don’t realize it’s in the undercarriage and it’s having an effect on the vehicle’s performance, we can see that through the connected car before there’s a problem—before you’re on the side of the road. So when you think about the benefits, they outweigh the inconvenience of learning about it. 

There’s been a lot of talk recently on environmental, social and governance factors, like labour in the supply chain. What are you hearing from customers or from dealers about ESG? What are you as a company most focused on?

Right now, 21 per cent of our vehicles are electrified, and demand is closer to 50 per cent. I was with a gentleman from Norway yesterday, where it’s 90 per cent. In Norway, they have an infrastructure that supports the growth. We do not.

I think the biggest concern our customers have with electric vehicles is, “Where do I charge?” 

We should have chargers at every gas station, in every strip centre, at every parking structure, at every new condo that’s been built, every home being built. It should be a requirement; the government should mandate it. They’re mandating us to build the cars. But if you build it, they don’t necessarily come—they’ll come if I can tell them where the right charger is.

Like your phone here, we automatically charge all over the place, right? I’ve got a charger in my hotel room, I’ve got a charger in my car, I’ve got a charger in my office, I have a portable charger as well. I don’t think about it anymore. But with a car, [millions of] Canadians don’t have garages. “Where do I go?” Try to answer that. 

I’m working with government saying, “This is the reality. You want us to be 60 per cent EVs. We have a plan. We could be there. But there’s not going to be demand for it. In Norway, they can charge at any Circle K in the entire country, and they have lounges and they have dining.”

I’m not looking for the government to build chargers. I want private industry to do it. You don’t need to spend a taxpayer penny on infrastructure. But you do need to tell the developers you’re not going to get a permit to build unless you put chargers in. You’re going to mandate that every gas station has a Level 3 charger. 

Private industry and government should work together. Building the cars—we’ve worked together, we’ve listened, we’ve responded. I just don’t understand why we’re not doing the same for the charging infrastructure. Once we get there, boy, that showroom conversation is gonna be real short, and they’re gonna drive off in an electric vehicle.

We’re seeing so much investment in North American manufacturing. The Canadian government has rallied behind it. Is there any discussion or any chance of some sort of expansion of Hyundai’s manufacturing into Canada?

There’s always a chance. There are discussions taking place that I can’t get into. But you have to understand the political environment, where the U.S. government is pretty much mandating that we build them down there. That doesn’t preclude plants—whether it’s Mexico, Canada or another plant in the U.S.—but you’re going to go where you have to go.

It is a possibility of seeing more plants in Canada, but it’s also another possibility to see whole infrastructure built to support EVs. In the Gold Rush days, [some] people made [more] money selling Levi’s than they did collecting gold, right? I think it’s the same with electric vehicles, whether it’s mining lithium, whether it’s building components. 

But governments have got to start working a little closer together. We can’t have tariff wars. We need free trade back and forth. I think the U.S. is going to learn a lesson real soon when it comes down to mining and minerals that are all up here in Canada. So my word to them is play nice, because we’re all in this together. And Canada is going to participate one way or the other.