Toyota Motor, one of the world’s most successful automakers, claims to be afraid of a lot of things: complacency, competition, and success itself. But in the United States, rival Hyundai Motor may well be at the top of Toyota’s list. “We’re worried about them,” Yukitoshi Funo, chairman, Toyota Motor Sales USA, told reporters in Detroit recently.

“Our main competitors in the US are essentially Honda Motor, Nissan Motor and Hyundai, but Hyundai is the one we are very carefully watching,” he said on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show, reports Reuters. South Korea’s top automaker, until recently a target of jokes about broken-down parts, has dramatically raised its profile on the world stage with a benchmark study by research firm JD Power showing an improvement in quality to match the best Japanese brands.

Hyundai now sells far more cars than Volkswagen, Mazda and Subaru in the US. It expects sales to rise more than 10 percent this year to over 500,000 units, in an overall market that it reckons will shrink. In 2005, Hyundai’s sales rose nine percent to 455,012 units, giving it a market share of 2.7 percent.