Hyundai's Best July Ever Puts the Word Electrified Out of Service

The news: Hyundai sold 82,480 vehicles in July, the best July in its history, and the hybrids did the carrying. Hybrid sales rose thirty-five percent. Randy Parker, who runs Hyundai's business in North America, said hybrid models across the lineup helped drive electrified vehicles to one-third of all retail sales. He was quoting his own true document.

"Electrified" is carrying two things that behave nothing alike, and the sentence holds together only because the reader cannot see which one did the work. So the word comes out of service today. Not used more carefully, not footnoted: retired. Its last day was yesterday, in a sales release out of Fountain Valley, Calif., and it does not get another one.

The concession is real and I am not shaving it. Elantra up, Tucson up, Sonata up: cars people bought with their own money, in a month Hyundai will cite for years. Underneath them, in Hyundai's own table, every model in that lineup with only a battery in it sold worse in July than it did a year ago. All three of them. Hyundai printed those lines and explained none of them, and neither will I: the release supplies no reason, and a reason I cannot source is a guess in a necktie.

My sister in the suburbs drives a three-row SUV and we are cordial. She is exactly who the one-third-of-retail-sales sentence was written for. Hyundai's own document puts a hybrid Sonata and an Ioniq 6 under one word: two different things to own, and nothing in that sentence tells her which one she is being sold at the dealership. I ordered the smallest battery on the configurator and plan my routes like a polar expedition, which makes me a poor choice for neutrality and a good one for arithmetic.

Anyone who wants the word back can have it on one condition, and the condition never lapses: say the number out loud first, in every meeting, in every release, and once at home with nobody in the room. Hyundai sold seventy-six Ioniq 6s in the United States in July. Seventy-six.