OREANDA-NEWS. St. Petersburg Hyundai plant in March will start the test assembly of the compact crossover Hyundai Creta, in May it will remove from the production of Solaris hatchback and until the end of the year it will launch the updated Solaris sedan, said the general director of the enterprise Choi Dong El. Investments in the organization of assembly of the two models will be $ 100 million.

The assembly of hatchback was decided to stop "to optimize the capacity utilization of the plant," the representative of "Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus" explained the newspaper "Vedomosti". In the total sales of KIA Rio hatchbacks have 14% (in 2015 it was sold 97,097 units, according to the AEB), but the company has no plans to stop their production in St. Petersburg, said the representative of KIA Motors Rus. «KIA Rio - is our bestseller in Russia, which has a half of sales of the brand in the country, and we would like to keep the maximum choice in terms of the type of bodywork", - he explains.

In 2016 "HMMR" plans to produce more than 200 thousand cars. "About the Creta share [in the total output of the plant] it is too early to speak, its commercial production will start only in the III quarter," - said the representative of the plant. « This year Creta will not be able to replace the volume that fell on the hatchback”, - said the general director of “Auto-Dealer-SPb”, Michail Chaplygin. – “It is not excluded that it will be refunded after the start of the production of the updated model at the end of the year. "

In 2015, it was sold 115,868 Hyundai Solaris cars, according to AEB data were sold in Russia. The cars with hatchback body had about 20%, said the representative of Hyundai Motor CIS. According to him, Creta will take those people, who have chosen Solaris hatchback: "It is, of course, cars of different segments, but the target audience is largely overlapped," - says the analyst of "VTB Capital", Vladimir Bespalov, the leave of hatchback will help to avoid internal competition with the new model. It is not disclosed how much will Creta cost. Solaris Hatchback costs from 565,900 rubles, now it is the cheapest car in the Hyundai model range.