Hyundai N and the People that create the success
SEOUL, Korea – It really is about people. You can look into the numbers of the Hyundai N program, and you will see all this great information. Words and numbers that will tell you things.
But you see that everywhere. It is in the people, and how they act. And interact. And just the sheer joy you see and feel in letting good people do what they want to do.
The driving instructor that we spent most of the in-car time with for the circuit portion of our time at the massive HMG Driving Experience Center, for example. He was an accomplished racecar driver, yes, but it was his ability to translate his knowledge into something a larger audience could understand easily that set him apart. And it wasn’t memorized. He was explaining what he knew and thought and felt.
In the Elantra N models we drove and then he drove around the track, for example, he was able to explain how the wheels were communications with us, as we dove deeper into corners. This was possible because the car was so stable and consistent at very high speeds both straight and cornering. It was also possible because he chose to buy the exact same model for himself.
The exact same. The N models are developed to be extremely capable track vehicles (though not of course full race cars but that can be easily remedied if you go serious) but also meant to be good daily drivers. We could have driven out of a showroom in a new car and done exactly what we were doing. At over 200kph on a banked track where it was hard to lift our feet.
It is in the people.
The driving instructor then ran us through the off-road course while talking about how the course was so hard that he himself had to be pulled out by a tractor before. Because they really test past the limits. He explained how he had done this with cars that cost multiples of what vehicles like their Palisades did, not everything but pretty much. It was nice, he said, to make this type of thing more accessible to more people. We also talked about his dream camera while he played with the Leica SL3 we had brought for testing. So, this was really more conversation than marketing.
It is in the people.
“Mr. N” is what they called him, on the radio. Even when they were telling him to queue up behind the others because leaders still follow rules. JooNWoo Park has the official title of Vice President N Brand Management Group, but they really do use that nickname. It was his bright idea to start this program and fight for it, and the engineers talking to us laughed when they told us of how long just the discussions took, let alone the actual design. A big risk for something that didn’t exactly follow corporate numbers.
But there were enough believers apparently. We were standing in an amazing facility, walked from a luxurious seminar space through to what looked like an aircraft carrier hanger but wider. Filled with rows of cars. Not a few, not a couple lines. Rows of N cars widely spaces filled the area. It is not often that each person is assigned a car just to drive around the track to different places. In these situations we would usually be shuttled. Here we drove the N cars everywhere. Their last count had 192 cars available for their use, with a space of 1,260,000 square meters of space that included that banked oval. It took a while to get from one of the 20 different program areas to another.
Serious commitment.
But the belief in the people, and in their vision, worked. The other car we were testing most of the time that day was the IONIQ 5 N, which won the 2024 World Performance Car Award at the World Car Awards event at the New York Auto Show after global testing. The car was meant to be insane but accessible. It could drag race at such speeds it shook me when the cars drove by, but it also had a drift mode that was meant to make it that, as Mr. N said, anyone can drift.
So what did we come away with? Can Hyundai make excellent cars? We knew that? Have they been pushing and breaking barriers? We kind of knew that as well. But past the precision and efficiency and value and experience that they want you to have and are committed to creating, we came away with this.
They want you to feel good. It wasn’t in what they said, it was more in how hard they worked, how deeply they cared and shared, how Mr. N didn’t make a perfect Scandinavian Flick the first time so he explained it and did it again. And laughed.
