WTF is going on at Hyundai?
Just 25 years ago, Hyundai was a joke. Now, it's the third-largest automaker in the world building great, competitive cars with standout designs and legit enthusiast credibility And it wasn’t luck that did it.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Hyundai was in crisis, still struggling to break into the American market and move past its image as a crappy, low-budget brand. Korean cars were seen as cheap knock-offs of superior Japanese models, reliability sucked, and there was no obvious path forward.
That could’ve doomed the company, at least in America, but Hyundai didn’t give up. Instead, under the new leadership of the son of Hyundai’s founder Chung Yu-Yung, it doubled down and spent billions of dollars in the 2000s to sow the seeds of total transformation.
That included introducing its now famous 10-year/100,000-mile warranty, investing in huge R&D and manufacturing facilities in the US, poaching big-name designers and engineers from top automakers, and upending traditional Korean business culture to start letting outsiders make key product decisions.
And another key factor—Hyundai’s near-total dominance of the Korean car market meant it had a stable business back home to fund and support this spending spree.
By the 2010s, it was starting to work, but what really amped things up was hiring Albert Biermann away from BMW M to start Hyundai’s N Performance division in 2014 and Luc Donckerwolke from Lamborghini and Bentley to head up global design. Those two moves gave its cars real legitimacy with enthusiasts, a distinctive design language that continues to this day, and enabled it to launch Genesis as a standalone luxury brand with competitive models.
Finally, a few years ago Hyundai made one more key hire: Jose Munoz, a literal nuclear physicist and former deputy to Carlos Ghosn at Nissan. Munoz took over running North American operations, helped lead Hyundai to record sales here following early investments in EVs and hybrids, and in 2024 was promoted to global CEO.
In many ways, Hyundai is now where Toyota and Honda were in the early 2000s, with a complete lineup appealing to almost every kind of buyer at every price point, a strong reputation for quality, and a global business working in harmony. It’s one of the most remarkable turnarounds the auto industry has ever seen. And in many ways, Hyundai is still getting started.
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0:00 1999 vs today
1:57 Hyundai's rough road
3:17 The 2000s turnaround
6:15 Hiring the best
9:59 Building better cars
11:47 Design, design, design
14:47 Engineering ups and downs
17:13 Serious concepts
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