Hyundai’s Pony Coupe Concept may look like a company vanity project, but it serves a fundamental purpose. A design genius named Giorgetto Giugiaro painstakingly brought back to life a lost Hyundai prototype from the 1970s. It is also making people in Seoul talk seriously about making a small number of the excellent N Vision 74 and three electric cars based on the beautiful Genesis X Trilogy concept cars. People who make cars are known for being cold. Even when money is tight in the beginning, there is always the chance that the business will fail. In the late 1970s, Hyundai was still a young company. In a country eager to join the industrial revolution, it had only been making cars since 1967. Giugiaro’s cute little Hyundai Pony Coupe idea was quietly dropped when it was found that there wasn’t enough money to make it happen—also gone forever. The Hyundai Pony Coupe Concept Replica, presented in Italy on the eve of the expensive Concorso d’Eleganza Ville d’Este, is a tribute to Rosebud from the famous film Citizen Kane by Orsen Welles. The main character in the favourite movie, Charles Foster Kane, is now vibrant and thriving, just like the Hyundai Motor Company. Hyundai’s designers wanted a car that showed the company’s growth from a failing start-up to one of the biggest automakers in the world, just like Kane wanted the simple Rosebud sled he used as a child. Giugiaro and his son Fabrizio worked at GFG Style in Italy to bring back the Hyundai Pony Coupe Concept. It looks exactly like the first one that Hyundai got over 50 years ago. It looks great in metal, with the wedge and edge of the 1970s, a light greenhouse supported by thin struts, and huge four-spoke wheels with tall sidewall tires. There’s a hint of 2001: TIMER inside. It feels like “A Space Odyssey” with well-drawn shapes and materials that look new and fresh. SangYup Lee, the head of design at Hyundai, says that the 15-inch wheels are the only thing that looks different from the original Pony Coupe Concept. In 1974, the wheels were 14 inches in diameter. This change was made because it took a lot of work to find the section 14-inch tires that were needed. The fantastic thing is that the remade Pony Coupe Concept can run in its total. It has the same mechanical and structural parts as a 1970s Hyundai Pony four-door hatchback, which is how it would have been made if the 1979 oil crisis hadn’t caused a severe recession in the United States, which was the car’s primary export market, and forced Hyundai to stop production plans. Hyundai seriously considered making the Pony Coupe Concept and using it to break into a market for cars that is one of the most competitive in the world. This says a lot about the ambition and drive of a company that started making Cortina sedans for Ford Motor Company’s Korean market ten years earlier. Fabrizio Guigiaro surprised everyone by releasing the Pony Coupe Concept right after being shown off at Villa Pliniana, across the water from George Clooney’s Lake Como home. A few minutes later, Euisun Chung, the executive chair of Hyundai Motor Group and our 2023 MotorTrend Person of the Year, sat next to Giorgetto Giugiaro, the engineer who had designed the original car for Ju-Yong Chung fifty years earlier, and smiled as he revved the 1.2-liter four-cylinder engine. The Hyundai Pony Coupe Concept is a genuine origin relic and a Hyundai brand touchstone because it was made by the same person who made the first one 50 years ago and used the same design and building methods he used back then. Giugiaro also drove this car. But what’s the point? Top Hyundai officials say that many. CEO of Hyundai Motor Company Jaehoon Chang says the Hyundai Pony Coupe Concept “connects the past, the present, and the future.” Hyundai Motor Group and Genesis brand’s top creative officer, Luc Donckerwolke, says, “We have the youngest design team of any brand.” They rarely look back, but when they do, you learn about the people you look up to. The head of Hyundai’s design department, SangYup Lee, says, “We have to look at what we’ve done and use it to make the future.” The N Vision 74 concept, which takes shape and proportions from the Pony Coupe concept, may be the best way to show these thoughts in the coming years. If built, the production N Vision 74 will be a hydrogen-electric hybrid car like the concept. It will get power for its engine from the Hyundai Nexo’s 85kW (net) hydrogen fuel cell and a 62.4kWh battery that can be charged like a regular electric car’s battery. Whether driving on an interstate or in a city, the fuel cell stack makes all the power for the two electric motors at the back wheels, one for each spin. Hyundai’s experience in hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain technology would be shown by a limited-run N Vision 74. The only other fuel-cell car on the market is the Toyota Mirai. The only other fuel-cell vehicle on the market is the Hyundai Nexo. Hyundai’s construction equipment business already makes excavators powered by hydrogen fuel cells. A plan to make a small number of the beautiful Genesis X Trilogy concept cars could be another Hyundai project that was inspired by the idea of making the Pony Coupe Concept again. The X Coupe, X Speedium, and X Convertible are electric vehicles (EVs). They would be driven by a near-600 horsepower dual-motor, all-wheel drive engine powered by the 99.8 kWh battery recently introduced in the Kia EV9 SUV and linked by the company’s fast-charging 800V electrical architecture. Giorgetto Giugiaro said, “I wanted to push Hyundai to do something crazy” when asked why he made the first Pony Coupe Concept. And it looks like he’s done what he set out to do fifty years ago.
