By increasing its new car bumper-to-bumper warranty more than 50 per cent, Hyundai hopes to alert consumers to the quality of its current lineup and get them ready for the product expansion to come.

This warranty should certainly get the attention of anyone looking for a high-value vehicle, since the five-year, 100,000-km warranty removes concern about out-of-pocket costs for an extra two years or 40,000 km. Since it's a fully transferable warranty, it should also make Hyundai a more attractive choice as a used vehicle.

According to Steve Kelleher, president of Hyundai Auto Canada, "surveys have shown that warranties are important to consumers, and particularly to our consumers since our mix is at the lower end of the price scale where cost is important.'' Since its sales are down 20.5 per cent for the year, it might look as though the distributor of South Korean vehicles is simply responding to a bad situation, but Kelleher said in a phone interview that isn't the case.

The increase in the warranty is the result of years of work to increase quality. "When it gets down to it, our vehicle quality is what allows us to do this," he said. "When you build them better, you can back them better. When you can build quality vehicles and keep it on the road and out of the repair cost, you can do this.''

Kelleher wouldn't release specific data on where Hyundai stands on the various quality studies, though he did point out that Hyundai is now in the top-third of J.D. Power's quality studies.

He preferred to make the point that the company has reduced its warranty claims by 52 per cent in six years.

That decline in the money it has to pay dealers for the warranty work they do is what allowed Hyundai to offer this new coverage, which is well ahead of what its competitors offer on comprehensive coverage -- three years or 60,000 km. The only exception is its Kia sibling, which offers five years or 100,000 km comprehensive but only five years or 100,000 km of power train, versus Hyundai's seven years, 120,000 km.

By any count, Hyundai now has the best warranty in the business, beating even those of the luxury car companies. "Our vehicles are now all high quality," Kelleher said. Proving that to Canadian consumers is important because Hyundai is about to launch 11 new vehicles by the end of 2007, which includes entries in three segments (including the popular minivan market) it's not currently in.

"About the only thing we won't have by then is a pickup truck," Kelleher said, though that, too, "is on the drawing board and being talked about.'' A lot of these new vehicles will help Hyundai appeal to customers out west, where trucks are a bigger deal than they are anywhere else in the country. So that likely means two more SUVs (a smaller one called the Tucson and one bigger than the next Santa Fe) and a crossover vehicle in 2007.

Right now, Hyundai has offerings in segments that represent about 52 per cent of the total market, Kelleher said, but adding vehicles to new models will give them a better chance to make incremental sales increases.

Kelleher said Hyundai has the "most potential of any company in Canada. We'll be bringing in people who wouldn't have gone into a Hyundai store before, [so] there's a lot of upside to the franchise.'' Hyundai's already had a lot of upside in the past couple of years, along with some serious downside after a shooting-star start with the low-cost Pony in the late 1980s. That subcompact car went from being the best selling car in the country for a couple of years to a bad memory the company is still working to erase.

After Pony went away, Hyundai tried building cars in Quebec for a couple of years and then went back to importing everything from South Korea. Sales grew steadily along with the value-for-money reputation, and doubled over the past four years, taking market share from 2 to 4 per cent.

There has always been a lingering question about quality, but there's that new warranty to deal with that, and now Kelleher can say simply about sales that, "I think we can do better.'' Better as in? "We're trying to get to 6 or 7 per cent of market," he said, "and we have some work to do to get there." It probably won't happen until close to the end of the decade, he said, but should happen.

Porsche no longer

a sports car company

Measuring recent sales, Porsche is no longer a sports car company that also sells SUVs, it's an SUV company that also sells sports cars.

So far this year, Canadians have purchased a third as many units of the Cayenne SUV from the German company as Boxsters and 911s combined. After the first three months of the year, Porsche North America reported that it sold 161 Boxsters and 911s and 219 Cayennes.

The same trend is evident in the United States, as our American cousins have purchased 2,902 Porsche sports cars so far in 2004, compared with 4,035 SUVs.

Unfortunately for Porsche, this is not all added volume, as the sales numbers for the company's famous sports cars have collapsed since the arrival of the Cayenne about a year ago. At first, the company ascribed this shift to the novelty of the SUV, but now it looks as if a fundamental change has settled in for the firm from the Stuttgart region.

In the first three months of 2003, Canadians bought 210 sports cars, while Americans bought 3,753. So car sales dropped significantly with the arrival of the SUV in both countries and seem to be staying at that level.

This could of course change with the launch of the new 911 model (code-named the 997) next year following its debut at this September's Paris Auto Show, but who knows.

Who also knows what will happen if the company launches the four-door sedan that it's expected to offer next?

With regard to that new 911, details are sketchy this early in the game. Spy shots show the general shape will be retained but there will be noticeable changes to the look. Specifically, round headlights will return and there'll be bigger taillights.

The big news involves the growth of the flat-six engine to 3.8 litres and a requisite increase in horsepower and torque, but that's not really a surprise for Porsche. Certainly it's not as big a surprise as it becoming an SUV company.