UK newspaper, The Telegraph, is reporting that Hyundai will drop the i30 from 2017 and replace it with a small compact SUV. and it’s wrong!

THE HYUNDAI I30 was the best-selling car in June with 5521 sales, yet UK newspaper, The Telegraph is reporting that the brand will drop the i30 from 2017 in favour of a compact SUV. The Telegraph Cars section is claiming an ‘insider’ told it the Korean car maker would drop the small car when it reaches the end of its product life-cycle in 2017.

Given the success of the i30 in Australia, you’d have to think the ‘insider’ was talking about the UK market only, or that maybe that they’d had one glass too many at dinner when they spoke to The Telegraph. And, even then it sounds like a strange idea to entertain dropping a successful model to replace it with an untested one. Sure, Nissan was successful when it pulled out of the small car segment in the UK market to run the Qashqai, but since then other makers have caught up and the Pulsar is back in that market.

Locally, Hyundai would be mad to drop the i30, rather it would be advised to sell both the i30 and Creta alongside one another. Australians love the small Hyundai, and have a similarly strong love for SUVs of all shapes and sizes.

That said, we’ve sent an email off to Hyundai Australia and will update this article when we hear back.

UPDATE – 4 July, 2015: Practical Motoring spoke with Hyundai’s PR team overnight and was assured the The Telegraph story was an “interesting one”. “The next-generation i30 is well into its development,” Practical Motoring was told. So, there you go, not everything you read in the paper is true, who’d have thought it…