That was me. As I've said before, I'm
not saying the SX is not a popular trim (I am picking mine up tomorrow - yay!) nor does it not have demand. I
am (was) saying that this particular forum skews toward the higher end and inflates this sense of demand, that other trims are equally popular, and back when we had this convo - Kia shouldn't pour all its effort into just cranking out custom SXPs because we were banging our fists and angry about the wait. Compare this forum to the
FB group and you can see that the audiences are wildly different - that this forum skews higher end/fully loaded/anti-Nightfall, and FB is a much more representative cross-section of overall demand (lots of non-SX, pro-nightfall folks). And the fact that dealers are selling out of these things at all levels reinforces that the Kia's approach to the Telluride is much broader than the folks we see chiming in here.
You and me - we're the enthusiasts, and yes we want nice top level (or in my case, near-top-level) things. But the majority of buyers and future buyers are just people who want a good-looking SUV with value (defined up and down the price spectrum) and are going to go for many of the other trim levels. Kia is building for that full spectrum of demand.
And not to be nit-picky, but this is just...wrong (with a hint of cherry-picking).
Of course there's a high prevalence of Prestige when you narrowly slice the data to look at just the SX AWD trim, because that's the only way you can get it. But even then 95% of SX AWD including Prestige is incorrect. I'll assume you misread the data (the site doesn't make it easy) so here are some real stats:
* 12,809 SX AWD have Prestige. This is about 63% of SX AWD, so yes this does suggest that the majority of SX AWD units being produced are getting Prestige.
* BUT including SX FWD adds another 7142 units. So across the overall trim level you're down to only 47% of SX units having Prestige.
* And all of that is out of 96.5k Tellurides counted by tellystats. So SXPs are 13.2% of all Tellurides ever made.
Yes this is a non-trivial number, but the other side of it is 87% of buyers doing something different.
* Several other slices of this data show more units made than SXP - examples: S AWD (14.5k), S FWD (14.5k), EX AWD (15.9k) etc.
Finally, this is a fun exercise but it isn't a real way to interpret customer demand. I don't think anyone here would say "Nightfall demand is through the roof" because Kia prioritized that recently, or "No one wants towing" because we didn't see towing packages for a while. We should be careful about interpreting Kia's production patterns which are likely more due to supply chain issues, marketing investments (both things I've also mentioned in the past), or operational efficiency by producing in blocks (mentioned by others), rather than any perfect estimation of demand. It's fun directional analysis at best.
Thanks
