Hyundai Rebuilds Lost 1974 Concept Car with Giugiaro’s Help

Every car brand has its origin story, although some are more glamorous than others. Until recently, Hyundai seemed to pay little attention to its early history. Understandably, companies prefer to concentrate on growing success in the present and the future. That’s some success: The Hyundai Motor Group was the world’s fourth largest automaker by volume last year, producing more vehicles than Stellantis or General Motors.

But now Hyundai is more proud of its humble origins. Design boss Sangyup Lee cites the company’s first car, the 1974 Pony, as inspiration for many of the Ioniq 5 EV’s themes. He also acknowledged the same debt that the spectacular fuel cell ‘technology demonstrator’ N Vision 74 owed to a concept version of the same Pony created by Giorgetto Giugiaro, then working for Italdesign, in 1974.

But outside of photos, almost nothing of the original Pony Coupe concept has survived. The original show car is lost and considered long abandoned, no detailed engineering drawings to be found in the archives. If Hyundai wants the Pony Coupe concept, it has to build it.

Now, that’s exactly what happened. Giugiaro, now 84 but still hard at work, will oversee the creation of an exact recreation, as close as possible to the lost original. We will see it next year.

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Hyundai Motor Company was founded in 1968, but started making other people’s cars. Its first product was the 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 is determined to become its own automaker. In 1973, he recruited George Turnbull, a former British Leyland executive, to lead a team that would build a new car. He brought in a group of engineers from England to help create a new factory and a model to build. The prospect of generous tax-free salaries means there’s no shortage of talented applicants, and the team includes acclaimed race car designer John Crossthwaite.

At this point, the official story diverges from period reports. Hyundai was eager to highlight the novelty of the rear-wheel drive Pony, including its exterior design which it had contracted with Giugiaro’s Italdesign in Turin. The reality of South Korea’s fledgling supply infrastructure means that most of the Pony actually come from elsewhere. Underneath it was closely related to the contemporary Mitsubishi Lancer, sharing its engine, gearbox and rear axle. Many of the other components, including the brakes, instrument cluster and steering rack, are from England.

Hyundai wanted a traditional design for its first car, which was submitted by Giugiaro. The boxy pony has both the utilitarian honesty and the simple joy of the fastback. But no part of it could be called radical or exciting, which is why Hyundai immediately decided it wanted a more glamorous model shown alongside a four-door auto show to help generate interest.

Fortunately, Italdesign has used the floorpan Pony as the basis for the elegant coupe that Giugiaro has created to highlight his flair and that of his company. It was called Asso Di Fiori — meaning Ace of Clubs in Italian — and was to be shown in the Italdesign booth at the 1974 Turin Auto Show. At the last moment Hyundai decided to adopt it officially and called it the Pony Coupe. (Italdesign later recycled the Asso Di Fiori name for its next coupe concept which became the Isuzu Impulse.)

Beneath the hastily implemented Hyundai branding, the Pony Coupe looks sleek and stylish, but has little in common with its four-door sibling. The mid-1970s was Giugiaro’s busiest and most productive year, and the coupe was part of a spectacular two-door line that included the Maserati Merak and Boomerang, Lotus Esprit, Volkswagen Scirocco, and Alfa Romeo Alfetta GTV concepts. Elements of all of that is evident in the Hyundai, but it also features a slew of innovations including a hinged trunk lid at the top that technically makes it a hatchback. The cab also features a unique combination of a single-spoke steering wheel, up-and-down linear instruments — with red markers moving against a fixed scale — and a small, raised gear shifter.

While the Pony Coupe concept looks great, it’s definitely far from production reality—especially for a company that has just started building its first model. Sangyup Lee, who has spent time tracing Hyundai’s early history through company archives, said the company quickly realized, as he cautions, that “the Pony engine and chassis would struggle to deliver credible levels of performance.” The Coupe concept appeared at various auto shows and received different wheels and partial repaints over time. Then it disappeared, possibly discarded but possibly still tucked away in a storage facility somewhere in Korea.

But Hyundai clearly wants to turn this into a car that can be bought. While researching the concept’s history, Hyundai came across one image of a different car sitting on a storage pallet. This appears to be a production version of the Coupe incorporating a similar roofline and side graphics with more conventional quad-headlights. Beyond the flatter sides, and lack of gullwing doors, it bears an unmistakable resemblance to Italdesign’s more famous design from the later, the DeLorean DMC-12. Like any efficient craftsman, Giugiaro will obviously recycle good ideas rather than risk losing them.

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Nearly 50 years after his first visit to Hyundai’s new Ulsan factory, Giorgetto Giugiaro is back for the official announcement of the new Coupe concept. It will be built by the GFG Style company in Turin which Giugiaro owns with his son, Fabrizio. Work has started, although original documentation is lacking, and we can expect to see the finished car next year. This represents an enormous amount of cost and effort to remake a car that only automotive historians remember, but which the company says was clearly important.

“Giugiaro is Hyundai’s first designer,” said Hyundai President Luc Donckerwolke CD at the announcement ceremony in Korea. “It is a relationship that should be celebrated. But [the Coupe concept] also proves that Hyundai is always thinking about making cars that are more attractive and desirable.”

Donckerwolke himself is a highly experienced car designer, formerly Hyundai’s chief creative officer, who worked closely with Giugiaro during his time at Lamborghini. He also acknowledged that future collaborations remain possible, especially since several other Giugiaro-designed Hyundai models from the 1970s and 80s could serve as inspiration for other future products and concepts.

Giugiaro himself is clearly pleased that one of his lesser-known works is being reborn, but also wants to emphasize that the Pony Coupe isn’t just the precursor to the more famous DeLorean.

“It does have a lot in common with DMC-12,” he said CDspoke through an interpreter, “but just being similar doesn’t make them the same — what matters is striking a balance.”

“Proportioning in a balanced way is always important, so some aspects may repeat themselves,” he says, “but even though we have a similar face when creating a product, there are many differences and the similarities are not the same thing as equals.”

It is perhaps undeniable that with so many highlights in his portfolio, the Maestro himself will always prefer to talk about differences over similarities.

He did reveal another interesting detail from that period, in that Volkswagen was planning to use the Pony name for the hatchback he was styling for them at the same time he was working on Hyundai’s first car. But the Korean model hit the market first, and stole the name, so Volkswagen had to quickly rename it the Golf.