New utes from GAC and Hyundai to further crowd saturated market led by the 2026 Ford Ranger, Toyota HiLux and BYD Shark 6

GAC ute digital render. (Image: Thanos Pappas)

With all due respect to GAC and its plans for a new dual-cab ute — please don’t. Same goes for Hyundai, which has been talking up its plans for a ute in recent months, and Chery that has a yet-to-be-named new ute incoming.

We have enough utes in this country.

That might sound like a ‘click-bait, hot take’ (and it partially is) but it’s also very much true. The ute market in Australia is getting over-crowded and new additions will make it even more densely packed.

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Don’t take my word for it, Sean Hanley, the former sales and marketing boss of Toyota has been saying we’ve reached ‘peak ute’ for more than a year. Coming from a man who oversaw the enduring sales success of the HiLux and introduced the Tundra to Australia, that’s a notable position to take.

Speaking in January 2025, Hanley said he wasn’t confident that more utes arriving would equal more sales overall.

“I’m not necessarily sharing a view that it's going to grow astronomically because of the new entrants,” he said. “It may, I could be wrong, but it’ll be interesting to watch.

“Looking towards the future, we already know that the number of ute models available to Australian buyers will expand rapidly.

Hyundai ute digital render. (Image Digimods design)

“They’ll be competing for an overall ute market that is likely to remain steady, which suggests that the average sales per model will come down as a result.”

That hypothesis was proved correct when the 2025 sales were tallied. The ute segment grew only 2.7 per cent between 2024 and ‘25, despite 12 new entrants from several new brands — including Kia, BYD, MG, Foton and GWM.

Go back five years and look at the difference between 2021 and ‘25 and the idea of hitting ‘peak ute’ comes into even greater focus. In that span there was 5.9 per cent sales growth but a 41 per cent increase in the available number of models.

Kia Tasman

Hanley followed up his January comments with more at the launch of the new HiLux late in 2025.

“So when I say the ute market's peaked, what I mean is that, well, exactly that, it's peaked. But it's still a significant market, and it will be for the future,” he told CarsGuide.

"But I think that whole ute market's going to be crazy for the next couple of years. So in the end it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what customers think.”

Toyota HiLux

Nissan Oceania Managing Director Andrew Humberstone, seemingly along with GAC and Hyundai management, believes the contrary and the ute market has increased volume in its future.

“I don't want to really talk specifically about numbers, but we see certainly an increase in volume,” he told CarsGuide in December ‘25.

While BYD has made strong in-roads into the ute market with the Shark 6, cementing itself as a top five selling dual-cab, the reality for most of these new players is they are attracting relatively small volumes.

Kia, which set a public goal of 10,000 sales by the end of ‘25 managed less than half of that (4196), while despite a competitive price and bigger-than-average size, the MG U9 managed only 472 sales in the few months it was on sale. Foton split 177 sales between its Tunland V7 and V9 since they hit the market in late ‘25.

But even some models that were on sale for the full year in 2025 fared poorly. The Jeep Gladiator found just 332 buyers, while the Isuzu D-Max, Mitsubishi Triton, Nissan Navara and Volkswagen Amarok all experienced sales drops.

Of course, this story won’t stop the new utes from GAC, Hyundai and Chery coming, nor any other brand that wants to join in, but the reality is none are likely to dramatically increase the size of the overall ute market. Instead, the share of the market will just get divided up into smaller and smaller pieces.

In the end, natural selection will play its part and the models that don’t sell will simply be overlooked by buyers and are likely to disappear eventually. One way or another, Australia will not have an endlessly growing number of utes to choose from.