What's Wrong With This Picture: Hyundai Genesisn't Edition
In the midst of a nearly 3,000 word InsideLine treatise on the forthcoming Equus and Hyundai’s upmarket intentions in general, Hyundai’s USA boss John Krafcik reveals that the car pictured above very nearly became the Hyundai Genesis. No, really.
There was a lot of internal debate on design direction for Genesis. We used a European design house as an early consultant, and its proposals informed the core design elements of the first approved exterior model, which got as far as the tooling stage. In our industry, when you’ve built tools to stamp the exterior sheet metal, you’ve committed millions of dollars, and so you’re pretty much committed at that stage to bring that design to market. But in the end, we weren’t happy with the design. So we made the right decision (albeit a difficult and expensive one) to redo the exterior with a cleaner, more athletic and more enduring design, homegrown from our own design studio.
I got one word for you Krafcik: ballsy.
Let’s be real, the Genesis is hardly the best looking car available, but it’s a damn sight better than this mess. Showing a styling buck that was turned down is a highly unusual move, and one that shows how new Hyundai is to building aspirational cars. But it also shows that, unlike certain established premium brands, Hyundai takes its work more seriously than its mystique. That’s a fresh perspective that can only make the luxury segment more competitive.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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I wasn't aware it was ballsy to do one's job. Or to know passably-handsome from bloated Accent. Really, I just thought they were common sense.
I think Ed meant that it was ballsy on the part of John Krafcik because he made the decision to change the design after so much money had already been spent on the design pictured in the article. He was taking a risk that the current design would be accepted and profitable. I don't care for the design pictured in the article.
Um, why wasn't this problem caught at the 3-D CAD rendering stage, or at least at the clay model stage? Kudos to Hyundai for making the right choice at the end, but why did it take them so long? And, which European design studio did the original? Maybe a double agent???
That styling buck, had it reached mass production, would've signaled Hyundai wasn't yet ready for prime time. Good thing John Krafcik sent it back. The current Genesis grille isn't a classic either but a simple mid-cycle facelift can fix that aspect of an otherwise attractive car.