Simon Loasby, CDR 11: “We have to challenge sacred cows sometimes”

Hyundai design is moving at such a pace that we seem to have ‘monthly’ design reviews every two weeks at the moment. At a recent presentation, our teams presented 35 full-size interior and exterior models, virtual and physical, across multiple projects over four hours. Every one of our design studios had content in that presentation: Japan, India, America, China, Europe and Korea and all studios had at least one person physically present. This is our way of harnessing the grey matter from across the whole organisation and making it work for us.

That said, and I hope my Korean friends don’t mind me saying this, but Korea is quite an isolated place. If you draw a radius of 100km from our design studio in Namyang and count how many design studios you find, it’s not many. If you do the same thing anywhere in Europe, you’ll have a whole host of them. It’s a different perspective. Not saying it is better or worse, just a different set of challenges.

For instance, in South Korea we have zero natural resources – no oil or gas, nothing. The whole success of industry is based on creativity, knowledge and knowledge management. And we’ve got four of the biggest companies in the world based in South Korea. It’s only a country of 50 million people, but we have Samsung, Lotte Chemical, LG and Hyundai Motor group. What Korean society has built up has been developed through extreme intellectual effort (and pressure) over generations.

My biggest task is to try to remove that pressure: 60% of what I do is motivation. Make it fun. I try to make our teams remember that we are incredibly privileged to be under this pressure. When we have a design review, I request that everybody gives positive comments and suggestions of how designers can improve their work. Not just me, everybody. For me it is like the African philosophy of Ubuntu: you being better at what you do makes me better.

That said, our job is not to make it easy for the company: we need to ask, ‘do we truly believe in what we’re trying to do?’ Do we understand the customer, not just now, but the customer in the future? It’s a bit like a pendulum: if you go one way, you can get into too much trouble, and you might be torturing the organisation too much. But if you go the other way and don’t get in trouble enough, you are not pushing hard enough. So there’s a bandwidth, and I readily admit that we’re not always successful, but we want to get our designers to be confident enough to just have a go.

Sometimes presenting four models I’ll say, ‘guys, I don’t mind which one we do’, because they have all attained a level which can be successful. The crucial thing is whether they fit our ‘chess piece strategy’ and ‘customer- centric approach’ where we deliberately target a segment but don’t make big and small versions of the same thing. We have to challenge sacred cows.

One of things we are grappling with is how to use AI securely. Midjourney, Vizcom and ChatGPT are all open-source platforms. We are working with certain suppliers to set up our own private servers where we can source and create material but not share it back to the web. I use AI all the time to work up design briefs for our teams: I find it super-efficient. For example, I remember showing a colleague some images I had created on Midjourney who was blown away by them. Truth be told, it took me the distance from one set of traffic lights to the next when I was driving into Seoul: about 40 seconds.

In design terms Hyundai is all about being customer-centric, which means our ‘chess piece strategy’ can connect to very different customer mindsets. If a customer wants electric mobility, they can have it with the Ioniq 5, 6 or the Kona. Then you have the new Santa Fe, ‘the box’, which has hybrid and petrol versions and our next generation hydrogen- powered Nexo comes out soon too.

Of course, there is still a lot of expectation about the N Vision 74: is it coming or not? Believe me my name is on the list. And pretty soon the Ioniq 9 will be here, another full-electric car. We are not setting our brand up to be only one thing. Look at ‘China Inc’ about 20 years ago, they decided the future of mobility would be electric and we have seen five-year plan after five-year plan moving in that direction. The progress is remarkable.

I’ve been there quite often recently and have seen their nationalism and self-confidence growing. This strategy gives clarity, but at the moment for Hyundai ‘betting the house’ on one direction is not our way. Remember Betamax versus VHS? I believe we have a great philosophy and product range to cater for many mindsets. But most important, it is with great thanks to our teams that I can represent them her.