Why Korean Cars Are Cool Now #blogpost

Hyundai Motor Company will turn 50 on December, and its hard to believe how far the Koreans have come. They started making good looking, well built and reliable cars in the last 10 years but recently is where things got interesting.

Korean cars have never been appealing for car enthusiasts until now. This is why I think Korean cars are cool now.

Cars for Enthusiasts

In order to change Hyundai’s brand image a new performance sub-brand was announced alongside a WRC campaign in order to help developing better road cars. 4 years after the N brand was born, the first high performance Hyundai came to life.

The Volkswagen Golf GTI was the benchmark for this car. Hooned at the Nurburgring, 275HP, Limited Slip Diferential, Launch Control, Rev Matching, 6 speed manual transmission. Sounds good. 2 new N performance cars are expected to debut next year, one is a high performance Veloster and a Fiesta ST rival based on the i20.

Kia revealed the Stinger GT sport sedan, the benchmark this time was the Audi S5 sportback. Like Hyundai, Kia spent a lot of time tuning this car at the Nurburgring to make sure the Stinger drives as well as it looks. The top of the range Stinger features a 3.3 Twin Turbo V6 producing 365 hp and 376 lb.-ft. of torque, Brembo brakes, with RWD as standard or AWD as an option.

The most recent addition to these “emotional” Korean cars is the Genesis G70, Genesis is now a separate marque from Hyundai and the G70 is their 3-series rival. The G70 is based on the same platform as the Stinger therefore they share engines, however the G70 is shorter, lighter and more agile than the Stinger. With the same 3.3Twin Turbo V6 the G70 goes from 0-100km/h in just 4.5 seconds.

All these cars and future performance cars are benefit from Hyundai’s Technical Center at the Nurburgring and the knowledge from Albert Biermann (former BMW M chief engineer).
Also Hyundai has said that they will stick with manual transmissions for their performance cars.

Motorsport

It’s not easy to make fast and fun cars to drive from scratch, that’s why Hyundai announced a WRC program back in 2012 to collect knowledge and technology to apply on their road cars.
But not only rally, Hyundai debuted this year at circuit racing, using the i30N as base car for their new TCR project. Hyundai has committed to motorsport in order to develop more fun to drive road cars.

That’s the end, some things that are unseen about Korean cars and that I wanted to stand out. I do think these automakers deserve more respect from car enthusiasts.