Hyundai wants to leave the comfortable familiarity of Russian doll styling (meaning one basic design spread across an entire line-up) behind. SangYup Lee, the firm’s vice president of design, promises his team is on the brink of a design overhaul.
Lee told Automotive News he wants his team to style cars that are just as sexy as — or even sexier than — an Alfa Romeo. And, significantly, he wants every model in the portfolio to have a style of its own; you should be able to look at a Hyundai and tell whether it’s an Accent or a Sonata by merely looking at a few styling cues.
His team isn’t completely starting from scratch. The cascading grille will remain in the foreseeable future because it’s a key part of Hyundai’s design language. Each model in the range will wear a different variation of it; it will be taller or wider depending on the model, and odds are Hyundai will further differentiate its cars by using different inserts within the grille.
The shift will begin next year. We don’t know what car will inaugurate it yet, but Hyundai already gave us a preview of where it wants to take its design language last March when it introduced a concept named Le Fil Rouge (pictured) at the Geneva auto show.
“The Hyundai look [will be] more [like] chess. You see chess as a king, queen, bishop, knight. They all look different, they function differently, but when together, they became one team,” Lee, a former Bentley and General Motors designer, summed up.
Hyundai wants to leave the comfortable familiarity of Russian doll styling (meaning one basic design spread across an entire line-up) behind. SangYup Lee, the firm's vice president of design, promises his team is on the brink of a design overhaul.
Lee told Automotive News he wants his team to style cars that are just as sexy as -- or even sexier than -- an Alfa Romeo. And, significantly, he wants every model in the portfolio to have a style of its own; you should be able to look at a Hyundai and tell whether it's an Accent or a Sonata by merely looking at a few styling cues.
His team isn't completely starting from scratch. The cascading grille will remain in the foreseeable future because it's a key part of Hyundai's design language. Each model in the range will wear a different variation of it; it will be taller or wider depending on the model, and odds are Hyundai will further differentiate its cars by using different inserts within the grille.
The shift will begin next year. We don't know what car will inaugurate it yet, but Hyundai already gave us a preview of where it wants to take its design language last March when it introduced a concept named Le Fil Rouge (pictured) at the Geneva auto show.
"The Hyundai look [will be] more [like] chess. You see chess as a king, queen, bishop, knight. They all look different, they function differently, but when together, they became one team," Lee, a former Bentley and General Motors designer, summed up.
