Hyundai and Legendary Designer Giugiaro Collaborate on Rebirth of a Classic Concept Car

Every car brand has an origin story, although some are more glamorous than others. Until recently, Hyundai seemed to have little regard for its early history. The company preferred, understandably, to concentrate on the growing success of its present and future. That's some success: Hyundai Motor Group was the world's fourth-biggest automaker by volume last year, producing more vehicles than Stellantis or General Motors.

But now Hyundai is taking more pride in its humble origins. Design boss Sangyup Lee cited the company's first car, the 1974 Pony, as the inspiration for many of the themes of the Ioniq 5 EV. He has also acknowledged the similar debt that the spectacular fuel-cell "technology demonstrator" N Vision 74 owes to the concept version of the the same Pony that Giorgetto Giugiaro, then working for Italdesign, created in 1974.

But beyond photographs, almost nothing of the original Pony Coupe concept survived. The original show car is lost and presumed long scrapped, and there weren't any detailed engineering drawings to be found in the archive. If Hyundai wanted a Pony Coupe concept, it would have to build one.

Now, that is exactly what is happening. Giugiaro, now 84 years old but still working hard, will supervise the creation of an exact re-creation, as close as possible to the mislaid original. We will see it next year.

Hyundai Motor Company was founded in 1968 but started out making somebody else's car. Its first product was a Korean version of the Ford Cortina, a compact sedan from the British market. The larger and slightly grander German-market Ford 20M was later added to the portfolio, and Hyundai continued to build Fords under license into the 1980s.

But Hyundai was determined to become an automaker in its own right. In 1973 it recruited George Turnbull, a former British Leyland executive, to lead a team that would create an all-new car. He brought a group of engineers from the U.K. to help create both a new factory and the model for it to build. The prospect of generous tax-free salaries meant there was no shortage of talented applicants, and this team included well-known race car designer John Crossthwaite.

At this point the official story diverges from the one from period reports. Hyundai is keen to highlight the newness of the rear-wheel-drive Pony, including its exterior design that had been contracted to Giugiaro's Italdesign in Turin. The reality of South Korea's fledgling supply infrastructure meant much of the Pony actually came from elsewhere. Underneath it was closely related to the contemporary Mitsubishi Lancer, sharing its engine, gearbox, and rear axle. Many other components, including the brakes, the instrument cluster, and the steering rack, came from Britain.

Hyundai wanted a traditional design for its first car, which Giugiaro duly delivered. The boxy Pony had a utilitarian honesty and the modest excitement of a fastback rear. But no part of it could be called radical or exciting, which is why Hyundai soon decided it wanted a more glamourous model to display next to the four-door at auto shows to help raise interest.

Fortunately, Italdesign had already used the Pony floorpan as the basis for an elegant coupe that Giugiaro had created to highlight both his and his company's talents. This was called the Asso di Fiori—meaning Ace of Clubs in Italian—and was set to be shown on the Italdesign stand at the 1974 Turin auto show. At the last moment Hyundai decided to officially adopt it and call it the Pony Coupe. (Italdesign then recycled the Asso di Fiori name for a later coupe concept, which became the Isuzu Impulse.)

Beneath its hastily applied Hyundai branding, the Pony Coupe was sleek and stylish but bore few obvious similarities to its four-door sibling. The mid-1970s were Giugiaro's busiest and most productive years, and the coupe was part of a run of spectacular two-doors that included the Maserati Merak and Boomerang concept, the Lotus Esprit, the Volkswagen Scirocco, and the Alfa Romeo Alfetta GTV. Elements from all of those are seen in the Hyundai, but it also featured plenty of innovation including a glazed top-hinged trunklid that technically made it a hatchback. The cabin also featured the zany combination of a single-spoke steering wheel, up-and-down linear instruments—with red markers moving against fixed scales—and a small, raised gear shifter.

While the Pony Coupe concept looked great, it was clearly some way from production reality—especially for a company that had only just started building its first model. Sangyup Lee, who has spent time tracing Hyundai's early history through the corporate archives, said that the company soon realized, as he delicately put it, that “the Pony engine and chassis would struggle to give a credible level of performance.” The Coupe concept appeared at various auto shows and gained different wheels and a partial repaint over time. Then it disappeared, likely scrapped but possibly still sitting lost in a storage facility somewhere in Korea.