Hyundai opens $1.1 bn plant in Alabama

South Korean auto giant Hyundai has inaugurated its first $1.1 billion factory in the North American market.

The Alabama factory, the first in the US for the South Korean company is "the latest in a parade of foreign-owned facilities springing up throughout the South."

The plant has already started the assembly of Hyundai Sonata sedans and has the capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year. It also builds a new 3.3 litre V6 engine.

Each one -- Nissan Motor Co opened a factory in 2003 in Mississippi, a Toyota Motor Corp truck plant cranks up next year in Texas -- "is a sledgehammer swing at the crumbling fortunes of Ford and GM," the Washington Post said.

"A new US auto industry is emerging in which no single company is as dominant as GM once was and the lines between foreign and domestic manufactures are increasingly blurred. While Detroit (Michigan) suffers, the rest of the industry is doing rather well. Jobs and factory production are down in Michigan but rising in the South," it said.

"It is a zero sum game," said Walter McManus of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan.

Detroit factories are already building more vehicles than they can sell, so 300,000 new Hundai Sonatas flowing out of Alabama every year will just make GM and Ford to cut their own production further, he said.

Asian-owned companies continue to take a greater share of the US market with vehicles that consumers perceive as having better quality and better value than the American competition.