On June 2, the first U.S.-built Kia hybrid rolled off the assembly line in Ellabell, Georgia, and the badge it wore said a lot about where the car market has drifted. Kia Sportage Hybrid production started at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America (HMGMA), a sprawling Bryan County factory near Savannah that Hyundai opened in October 2024 to showcase its electric future. The Sportage Hybrid is the first Kia and the first gas-electric vehicle the plant has ever assembled.
That is the quiet twist. A factory built around battery-electric SUVs just celebrated its biggest 2026 milestone with a car that still burns gasoline, and the reasons sit at the intersection of cooling EV demand and a tariff regime that now rewards building in Georgia over shipping from Korea.
Kia’s First U.S. Hybrid Rolls Out in Georgia
The 2027 Sportage Hybrid is the third nameplate to enter production at the Metaplant, joining two Hyundai electric SUVs already coming off the same lines. Kia and Hyundai marked the launch with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on hand, and the first finished unit reportedly rolled to the stage on an autonomous mobile robot rather than under a driver.
The Sportage has been built in Korea for years. What changed June 2 is geography: the hybrid version now has a North American home, and the plant that makes it was conceived for something else entirely. Here is what the Metaplant builds today, according to the official Kia and Metaplant production announcement.
| Vehicle | Powertrain | Status at the Metaplant |
|---|---|---|
| Hyundai IONIQ 5 | Battery-electric | In production since October 2024 |
| Hyundai IONIQ 9 | Battery-electric | In production |
| Kia Sportage Hybrid | Gas-electric hybrid | Started June 2, 2026 |
Two electric SUVs and one hybrid. The plant’s name leans into the EV story, yet its newest product is the one customers are buying fastest. That gap is the whole story.
The Tariff Bill Hyundai Is Building Around
The math behind moving Sportage Hybrid output to Georgia is blunt. Korean-built cars sent to the United States carry a 15 percent import tariff after Seoul and Washington struck a trade deal that took effect November 1, 2025, cutting the rate down from 25 percent. A car assembled in Bryan County skips that line on the invoice.
The 15 percent figure is not settled, either. On January 27, 2026, President Donald Trump said he intended to push the rate back up to 25 percent, citing delays in Korea’s legislative process to ratify the deal. The Korea Times reported that Hyundai and Kia together would face roughly 11 trillion won in added annual cost if the higher rate returns. Localizing the Sportage Hybrid is a hedge against exactly that swing.
Kia’s leadership did not hide the logic.
We want to produce where we sell.
That was Seungkyu (Sean) Yoon, president and CEO of Kia North America, at the launch. It tracks with Hyundai Motor Group’s wider $21 billion U.S. localization plan, which includes a $5.8 billion steel mill in Louisiana slated to break ground in the third quarter of 2026, and a stated goal of building more than 80 percent of its U.S. sales volume on American soil by 2030. The Sportage Hybrid is one more brick in that wall.
Why the Hybrid Outsold the Electric Plan
When the Metaplant broke ground, the bet was that American buyers would shift hard toward pure EVs. They did not, at least not on the timeline Hyundai planned. The volume moved to hybrids, and the Sportage became the clearest example inside Kia’s own showroom.
The Sportage was Kia’s top-selling model in the United States last year, and the hybrid is doing the heavy lifting. The numbers tell the story plainly.
- About 183,000 Sportage SUVs sold in the U.S. in 2025, up roughly 13 percent year over year, a record for any Kia nameplate.
- Hybrid variants accounted for more than 60 percent of North American Sportage sales.
- Kia America moved 852,155 vehicles total in 2025, its third straight record year and first above 800,000.
- Kia’s EVs slid the other way after the U.S. federal EV tax credit lapsed at the end of September 2025, with the EV9 at 908 units and the EV6 at 603 in November, both down sharply from a year earlier.
Strip the marketing language away and the Metaplant is now hedging its own thesis. The EVs it was designed to flood the market with are facing demand resistance after the credit expired, while the hybrid it added late is the one chasing a 183,000-unit nameplate. Kia is feeling the same pull other automakers report; the company has separately leaned on hybrid demand in markets from India’s tax-driven Kia price cuts to the U.S., and rivals like Toyota are pushing fresh entries such as the Crown Sport hybrid SUV into the same gap.
A Plant Designed to Switch on a Dime
The reason Hyundai can pivot a flagship EV plant to hybrids in months is built into the factory itself. Chris Susock, the group’s chief manufacturing officer, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the site is “designed to switch on a dime,” and the Sportage launch is the first real test of that claim.
Adding the Sportage Hybrid took a second weld line, which finished equipment installation in December 2025 and came online the month before launch. The plant can build up to 10 different electric and hybrid models on the same footprint, which is why a gas-electric SUV could slot in next to two EVs without a new factory. The ramp ahead looks like this:
- One shift running now, with a second shift launching in the fall of 2026.
- Around-the-clock operations and a third shift planned by 2028.
- A long-range annual target raised from 500,000 to 580,000 vehicles, expected at full capacity by 2028.
That capacity bump, disclosed alongside the Sportage news, is the tell that the plant’s role has grown beyond its original EV brief. Hyundai is not just running the lines it built; it is adding shifts and lifting the ceiling because the U.S.-build math now favors it.
Georgia’s Bet Pays a Third Dividend
For the state, the Sportage launch is the third payoff from the largest economic-development project in Georgia’s history. The Metaplant employs close to 2,000 workers, branded internally as Meta Pros, the bulk of them hired from Georgia. Kia’s older West Point plant, west of Atlanta, runs with more than 3,200 team members and builds the Telluride, Sorento, the gas Sportage, and Kia’s EV6 and EV9.
Together, Kia’s West Point factory and the Metaplant can now turn out up to 550,000 vehicles a year, a combined footprint that gives the brand a real domestic base if tariffs harden. Yoon called the Metaplant Kia’s second major investment in the state, and Tony Heo, the Metaplant’s president and CEO, credited the Meta Pros with getting the first hybrid line ready. Kia’s broader U.S. momentum, detailed in Kia America’s record 2025 sales report, gives the plant a deep order book to fill, and the company’s own 2025 sales-by-model breakdown shows how much of that volume the Sportage carries.
The second shift arrives this fall. The U.S. tariff rate on Korean cars may yet swing between 15 and 25 percent, but the Sportage Hybrid headed to American driveways now leaves a build plate that reads Ellabell, Georgia, not Gwangju, Korea.
