It’s been 32 years since I first drove a Hyundai. I can still remember it, a droning yellow Excel hatchback with a tan interior that smelled like an oil driller’s armpit. As I walked into the office of the magazine where I was working, I glanced back at the parked Hyundai (1986 Excels are shown below) and noticed the turn signal had fallen out of the front bumper and was hanging by a wire. These guys, I thought, have a lot to learn.
Three decades later, I voted to make the Genesis G70 our 2019 Car of the Year, the first Korean-made vehicle ever to win the coveted award. Entirely designed, engineered, and built by Hyundai, the dynamically accomplished and beautifully finished G70 is the real deal, a premium compact sport sedan good enough to put Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz on notice. Yep, they’ve learned a lot.
Hyundai began as a construction company founded by Chung Ju-Yung in 1947, as Korea began to rebuild after decades of oppressive occupation by Japanese militarists. Hyundai Motor Co. was founded 20 years later and in 1968 launched its first car, a copy of a Ford Cortina built under license from Ford Motor Company.
Hyundai revealed the first car of its own, the Pony, at the 1974 Turin Motor Show. The rear-drive, live-axle Pony was unremarkable in the context of cutting-edge front-drive small cars such the Volkswagen Golf—which also launched that model year. But the rapidity of Hyundai’s development process was stunning. Hyundai had hired the former managing director of Austin Morris, George Turnbull, to oversee the project in 1974. Turnbull brought with him five other British auto engineers. Barely two years later, Ponys—with Mitsubishi powertrains and British-made brakes, steering, and instruments, all wrapped in bodywork styled by Giugiaro—were rolling out of a brand-new factory.
Today, on the site of that factory in Ulsan, stands the world’s largest auto plant, a sprawling 1,200-acre complex employing 34,000 people and producing a new Hyundai every 10 seconds. When I visited Ulsan in the early 1990s, I traveled on roads made by Hyundai, past Hyundai-constructed apartments from which Hyundai workers took Hyundai buses to Hyundai-built factories, where they used Hyundai-made machinery to manufacture Hyundai cars that rolled on to Hyundai-built ships for export around the world. Even then, I couldn’t help but think old Henry Ford would have been impressed. Ulsan was—is—the Korean equivalent of Ford’s River Rouge plant, on steroids.
The Pony came to life with astounding speed (Volkswagen had spent more than five years developing the original Golf), fueled by the Koreans’ ferocious work ethic and their willingness to employ skilled outsiders. And echoes of that unique culture still resonate through today’s Hyundai Motor Group.
A roll call of some of the key players behind the G70 makes the point. Former Lamborghini exec Manfred Fitzgerald heads the Genesis brand, and its design chief is Luc Donckerwolke, who has held key design roles at Bentley, Lamborghini, and Audi. Albert Biermann oversees chassis and performance tuning, while Fayez Rahman looks after platform development; both men previously held senior roles at BMW, with Biermann heading its M GmbH performance division for seven years.
But it’s the determination, talent, and energy of their Korean colleagues that has made the G70 a reality. Hyundai had been making its own cars barely 10 years, a scrappy outsider trying to break into the major leagues, when I drove that Excel.
Today, Hyundai Motor Group, which also controls 32.8 percent of Kia, is the world’s fifth largest automaker, closing in on GM and well clear of Ford. It builds small and midsize cars and SUVs that are generally better-designed and feel higher-quality than their Japanese and American rivals; Hyundai also makes classy luxury sedans either nation would now struggle to emulate.
It’s been clear for some time that Hyundai is the automaker Toyota should most fear, and maybe now Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi ought to start glancing in the rearview mirror. The fiery passion that powered the creation of the Pony still burns brightly in Korea. The G70 proves it.
More from Angus MacKenzie:
- Resurrection: The Rebirth of American Luxury
- Plugged In
- Check Engine: A Globalized Industry Collides With National Politics
- ePrix: Racing for the Future
- How Electric Vehicles Will Go Mainstream
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