Back to the roots: Giugiaro recreates the 1974 Hyundai Pony Concept

He is the father of the Volkswagen Golf, and he has shaped automotive design since the 1970s like no other designer: Giorgetto Giugiaro (84), Car Designer of the Century.

Giugiaro had sold Ital Design to the Volkswagen Group in 2010 and started his own consultancy, GFG Style, together with his son Fabrizio in 2015. Now he has teamed up with Hyundai to resurrect a lost icon: The 1974 Pony Coupe concept, a car whose traces disappeared in Korea decades ago.

GFG Style has time until the spring of 2023 to build the Pony Concept a second time from scratch. The project was announced in Seoul today by Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro, as well as Hyundai Motor Group design chief Luc Donckerwolke and Hyundai brand chief designer SangYup Lee. The project could pave the way for more collaborations down the road,” says Donckerwolke.

Giugiaro and Hyundai are tied together through a long history. The first unique production model, the compact fastback sedan Pony, was penned by Giugiaro, and the same goes for its facelift; its successor named Excel; the 1982 upmarket sedan Stellar with its Lancia and Maserati overtones, and finally the 1988 Sonata. After that model, the Koreans decided to empower their own styling department and go for their own designs.

The Stellar is seen as the first ancestor of the upscale daughter brand Genesis.

In the early 1970s, the Audi Asso di Picche concept prompted Hyundai’s top management to seek out Giugiaro, who proceeded to design not only the production Pony but also the handsome Pony Coupé. It had a good shot at series production, but eventually the economic situation made Hyundai kill the project.

It took Donckerwolke and Lee to rediscover the geometric, clean, and slightly aloof aesthetics of the Giugiaro era. The concept 45 of 2019, which led to the Ioniq 5 production car, was directly inspired by the Pony, and even the published sketches paid homage to Giugiaro’s illustrations of the time. In 2021, the design team converted a classic Pony into an EV in the form of a “restomod.” And the 2022 Concept N Vision 74 is inspired by the lost Pony Coupé concept. All of these models took social media by storm.

The reborn Pony Coupé is not supposed to become a restomod. Instead, it is designed to reflect the original model with 100 per cent accuracy. This includes a combustion engine and steel wheels. BMW has followed a similar approach in 2019, when they rebuilt the Garmisch concept. Building the Pony Coupe again chiefly aims at filling a gap in the corporate history, says Donckerwolke.

On the side, Giugiaro relayed an interesting anecdote: He says the VW Golf was originally supposed to be called VW Pony, and he is still in possession of the badge he was supposed to put on the car. When VW learnt via Giugiaro that Hyundai was working on a model with the same name, they were scrambling to find a new name.

The Giugiaro-designed first-generation Golf, Scirocco and Passat are still considered to be iconic in Wolfsburg. We suspect VW will look very closely at the rekindled partnership between the maestro and the Korean powerhouse.