Kona Electric cars began rolling off the lines yesterday at Hyundai’s plan in Frýdek-Místek, the first mass-produced electric car to be manufactured in the Czech Republic. It’s taken a CZK 1.7bn investment by the company to get to this point and it plans to complete work on 30,000 of the vehicles by the end of 2020. Hyundai officials explained to journalists how the machines in the plant are changed several times per day in order to produce a variety of parts for its i30, Tucson and Konu Electric models. Its production lines had to be extended by a full 15 meters in order to add space for the installation of the heart of the car, its battery. The head of the Czech branch of Hyundai Martin Saitz revealed that delivery times to Europe from South Korea of up to a year for some models was the primary reason it had decided to introduce production in the Czech Republic.
