The Hyundai Crater Concept Is A Space-Age Off-Roader

After being teased earlier this week with some sketches and renders, the boxy Hyundai Crater concept has been unveiled in full at the Los Angeles Auto Show, and wouldn't you know it? Like nearly everything Hyundai's put out of late, it looks excellent.

Described as 'a design exploration that captures the spirit of adventure; it's been cooked up by Hyundai's US Technical Centre in California with the express aim of wooing customers in the US, a nation with a borderline unhealthy obsession with overlanding (i.e., greenlaning but over multiple days and with fewer flasks of tepid tea).

Hyundai already sells a pseudo off-road XRT trim on several of its models in the US, including the Ioniq 5, and the Crater is designed to explore further developments of that rufty-tufty sub-brand.

With that, we invite you to join us for a game of Off-Road Concept Car Bingo. Dabbers at the ready. We’ve got knobbly 33-inch tyres, tow hooks, underbody bash plates, roof-mounted spotlights and a big roof rack for carrying all your #lifestyleaccessories. Sounds like a full house to us.

Elsewhere, the Crater features the ‘parametric pixel’ lighting that Hyundai’s so fond of at the moment in a particularly minimalist form, with very slender arrangements for both head- and tail lights plus four individual little lighting units on the nose and tail.

A couple of neat little concept car-ish features have been baked into the exterior design. The side-view cameras can be removed to double as torches, and one of the tow hooks also serves as a bottle opener, presumably so you can crack open a cold one around the campfire right before you bust out the acoustic guitar and your best Jason Mraz cover.

Clamshell doors open up to reveal a minimalist interior full of more tubular elements than the Pompidou Centre, plus – rather unusually for a car of this sort, a functional roll cage. Maybe Hyundai's got some Nürburgring lap records in mind. The cockpit eschews big screens for the more personalisable 'Bring Your Own Device' approach we first saw on the Concept Three a couple of months ago.

What Hyundai hasn't said is what powers the Crater, presumably because it'd rather not hedge its bets by suggesting it has one powertrain or another in the currently unpredictable car market. It does, however, include many off-road goodies: front and rear diff locks, hill descent control, a compass and altimeter and a terrain response system with snow, sand and mud settings.

It also hasn't said if the Crater is something it intends to put into production, but given the appetite everywhere – and particularly in the US – for outdoorsy-looking SUVs and crossovers, we suspect it has at least a half-decent chance.