Car Design Review X: SangYup Lee, Hyundai

Design is, in a way, a weapon within a carmaker, depending on how you use it. Design can be a styling exercise or it can be embedded deep into the engineering. These are two very different approaches.

I liken it to a knife used in the kitchen and one used in war. Use it in the kitchen, it is a chef’s knife. Use it in war, it becomes a warrior’s sword. To my mind, the scope of design at Hyundai is greater than at any other carmaker. There are huge challenges facing us, but at the same time it is so much fun. In 30 years, I have never experienced such a depth of thinking in terms of the design process.

It bodes well for us in the future as we transition into a mobility business rather than just selling a well-engineered, beautiful car. Being more software-driven is inevitable, which means a whole new competitive landscape. We must compete with software companies such as Google. The scope today is so much wider. How will this change things? In the future, I think carmakers can actually give the vehicle away for free and then make money from providing a first-class service.

Our leadership has three very strong principles. No matter how sophisticated the software-driven car becomes, safety is paramount. That is number one. Number two is efficiency when it comes to electrification. Number three is content. These priorities are pretty much set, however, I would add that circularity is very important. We have been working with the Nature Lab at the Rhode Island School of Design because the natural world is the ultimate expression of circularity – a self-cleaning system which has developed over millions of years. For now, the debate seems to focus mainly on using sustainable materials, but they are a very small portion of circularity – we need to think about how we design, how we manufacture. We need to build an ecosystem that mirrors the one found in the natural world.

As a designer, I take inspiration from a lot of different places. Occasionally, I visit a shopping mall or a parking lot for a few hours and observe how people interact with their cars: how a parent puts their children in the backseat; how they move their stuff from the shopping cart to the tailgate space, for example. That kind of observation is invaluable – all the answers to design challenges are there in front of you. This is why we describe Hyundai as customer-centric design.

We really try to understand our customers’ lifestyles and react to real-life situations. This is why we are different from most car brands. If you take that as the essence from which you develop the design, you can understand our ‘chess strategy’. Chess has many pieces: king, queen, bishop, knight. They all look different to each other, they function differently, but together become one team. Each one of our pieces reflects our customers’ lifestyles, whether it is a small car for Generation Z or a large family SUV.

A good example is the new Santa Fe. Family travel used to be a lot more socially interactive – singing a song together or parents telling stories to their children. But these days, kids are basically, “I need my USB port and wifi. Leave me alone.”

This is why the Santa Fe has a USB port on every seat and two full-size cup holders in every seat. This is one of the examples of customer-centric design we’re talking about. It is no longer just a feature line or grille shape. It’s about the design reflecting the customer’s lifestyle. And then brand consistency comes from our pixel lighting, or, as with the Santa Fe, a large interior space which we liken to a living room. Big data also plays a role in predicting future trends. We were seeing, even before the pandemic, a trend towards what we call Cha-bak in Korean, which is like camping but where you stay overnight in the car.

Amid the pandemic, the outdoor lifestyle became far more popular. And when you look at these mid-size SUVs from 20, 30 years ago, they were all rugged, outdoorsy SUVs. Our rivals – like the Kia Sorento, Toyota RAV4 and Honda Pilot – are city lifestyle SUVs. So we saw a gap in the market for a car that blurs the line between the outdoors and the city. The type of customer we were targeting informed the design of the Santa Fe. We started designing from the back of the car first. So, when you open up the tailgate, it becomes a nice awning that shields you from the sun and rain. It is also the widest in the segment by far, 160mm wider than it was previously. And when you sit next to the wheel arch, there is a really nice Bose sound system and cup holders.

With our ‘chess strategy’, Hyundai is on a good path. Our next big challenge is the new generation of Genesis, which will all be luxury EVs. Tesla is the leading EV company because of its over-the-air (OTA) updates and software engineering. But nobody calls Tesla a luxury car. We want to make a true luxury EV that covers the software and hardware sides. From the start of next year, you’re going to see some really cool visions from Genesis. We are working hard on realising these visions and I am really looking forward to showing what we can do.