Hyundai’s Chairman Took His EV Pitch to Erdogan

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday to talk about electric vehicle cooperation, three months after the group’s oldest overseas plant started building its first EV.

The meeting puts the group’s top executive behind a factory in Izmit that opened in 1997 and that Hyundai now wants to use as a manufacturing base for Europe, with Turkey positioned as a bridge between the European and Middle Eastern markets.

The Turkish Presidency confirmed the meeting, The Korea Herald reported on November 5, and media reports said Vice Chairman Chang Jae-hoon and Hyundai Motor President Sung Kim were also in the room. The Herald said the goal is to strengthen Hyundai’s manufacturing base in Turkey and expand from there into Europe. Erdogan also met executives from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and SK Chemicals, which have production or sales subsidiaries in the country.

The Izmit plant was Hyundai’s first vehicle factory outside Korea, and Hyundai’s own account of Chung’s July 30 inspection visit, published by Hyundai Motor Europe, says capacity expansions in 2007 and 2013 brought it to roughly 200,000 vehicles a year and that it has built about 3.4 million cars, among them the Accent, Grace, Starex, Matrix, i10, i20 and Bayon. The Korea Herald puts the plant’s annual capacity at 250,000. Mass production of the Ioniq 3, the small electric hatchback Hyundai is selling in Europe, began there in August after a pilot run that started in May.

Hyundai’s Turkish subsidiary aims to sell 9,000 EVs this year and to become one of the country’s top three EV sellers, according to the Herald, and from 2027 it plans to add next-generation hybrids and extended-range electric vehicles to its lineup there. The commercial logic is the same one Hyundai is following in the United States. Turkey added a 40 percent tariff on Chinese-made EVs in 2023, which rewards automakers that build locally, and Hyundai is one of the few that already does.

None of this touches a car sold in America. The Ioniq 3 is not offered in the US, the i20 and Bayon never were, and Hyundai’s North American EV plans run through the Metaplant in Georgia rather than through Izmit. What the meeting shows is the pattern, because Chung spent the summer inspecting the Izmit line and the fall shaking hands with the head of state whose tariff policy makes that line worth having, and that is the same playbook the group is running with its Georgia and Alabama investments to get around US tariffs.

The HyundaiHQ Take

Chung does not fly to Ankara for a photo opportunity, and a meeting that also pulled in Samsung, LG and SK says Turkey is courting Korean manufacturing at the moment Hyundai needs a cheap way into a Europe that is closing its doors to Chinese EVs. The Izmit plant has been quietly building small cars for nearly thirty years, and turning it into an EV and hybrid base for Europe is a far smaller bet than the Metaplant was. For American readers the lesson is that Hyundai’s answer to tariffs everywhere is identical, which is to build inside the wall, and the group now has a chairman willing to negotiate that personally in two hemispheres.