Access denied! Why Kia’s American SUV superstar won’t come to Australia to battle against the dramatic 2026 Hyundai Palisade

Don’t hold your breath for the next-generation Kia Telluride.

Plans for the rugged-looking, three-row, monocoque-bodied big SUV that saved the company (and its dealer network) in North America seem to have permanently stalled for Australia, and for the second time since the series’ debut six years ago.

Why the rejection?

Especially when the Sub-$80,000 Large SUV segment is booming right now, with sales up over 15 per cent year-on-year to the end of July this year? And despite its sister model, the Hyundai Palisade, having been available here since the start of this decade (and with the redesign coming soon)?

Unfortunately for Australia, as the first Kia expressly designed for North America, the Californian-penned Telluride is only built in the US, and so is a left-hand-drive (LHD) native.

And, despite pleas from senior Kia Australia (KAU) management, no right-hand-drive (RHD) development has been forthcoming.

This means we will likely never get to see the next-gen Telluride even though it has not even been unveiled yet. US and Canadian sales are expected to commence in December.

Like with the Tasman, Australia would probably be the largest RHD market in the world; but the big SUV segment is around half the size of utes, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of total market volume. Basically, the numbers would not add up for the extra tens of millions of extra development work necessary to move the steering wheel over from the left to the right side of the Kia.

And that's not even taking into consideration the considerable added expense of importing the vehicle across the Pacific.

Adding insult to injury, the closely-related Palisade is manufactured at Hyundai’s massive Ulsan Plant complex in South Korea, where there is plenty of production capacity as well as consumer appetite for it. To protect that, the Telluride is not even sold in Kia’s home market.

But with the factory struggling to keep up with North American demand, it means there is little incentive for the Americans to go to the trouble, expense and inconvenience of making a few thousand RHD Telluride models for Australia.

Illustrating the latter point, the US factory originally forecast around 20,000 units annually before the original model was unveiled in 2019, but snowballing orders driven by critical acclaim meant that figure doubled to 40,000, then quickly to 60,000, 80,000, 120,000 and now 150,000 units each year.

“It is strictly out of the Georgia factory,” according to KAU product planning manager, Roland Rivero.

“And even for the new one… also, which, unlike Palisade, if you're going to do a comparison, makes it very difficult to request the right-hand draw.

“So, there is no plan at this point in time. We can beg, but there's no plans for Telluride for Australia.”

What’s doubly disappointing for the KAU crew is that the next-gen model seems to have stepped up in terms of size and style, to further appeal to buyers.

“It looks fantastic,” Rivero revealed. “We've seen we've seen it in Namyang (Kia’s home-market engineering headquarters), and it looks great. I'd love to have that.”

That all said, KAU CEO, Damien Meredith, believes the Telluride would be more of a nice-to-have rather than must-have proposition in current market conditions, since the Carnival enjoys the lion’s share of the people mover segment in Australia at nearly 85 per cent.

In fact, with just over 6400 registrations year-to-date in 2025, it also out-performs Hyundai’s Santa Fe (3764), Palisade (1215) and its closely-related Staria MPV (665) cousin’s volume combined.

“If the opportunity arose for RHD, would we want to bring it in and just do business with ourselves?” he said. “So, we do 800 Carnivals a month. Do we want to do 600 Carnivals and 200 Telluride?

“My view is that we're pretty successful with Carnival and why would you want to play with that? And the reality is, Telluride is only LHD and it will never come in RHD.”

Do you think the Sorento, Carnival and EV9 flagship EV SUV provide enough three-row family transport to render the Telluride redundant in Australia?