[In the US, they broke away the Genesis ticking off a lot of Hyundai dealers.
And not 1 in 10 customers knows what a Genesis is!]
Hyundai was just several years into breaking away from the ignominy of the Excel’s reputation as a lemon, when it started raising prices big time. This was at a time when the Japanese manufacturers were continuing to de-content their cars, taking care to keep reliability of the bread-and-butter powertrain components intact, while chintzing out on trim, to keep pricing competitive. It took well over a decade of established Toyota reliability stateside before it started the Lexus marque. Hyundai really jumped the gun.