It was unexpected, but charming, similar to the last brown rye cookie thing in a Chex Mix bag that you thought you had already completely swept away. The “this” I’m referring to is an old 70s Hyundai Pony that was turned into an EV and redesigned by Hak Soo Ha, Hyundai’s chief interior designer and appeared on Instagram. It’s an old Pony and I think the upgrades, which are mostly modern but include some Nixie tubes on the board, are very smart and look fantastic.
The Hyundai Pony never came to America – we only got Hyundais after their initial vehicle-building efforts, when they switched from the rear-wheel drive Pony to the front-wheel drive Excel.
The Pony was the first car built in South Korea in large quantities and the first to be exported in any number as well. Built from 1975 to 1990, it was not exactly one great car, as it was roughly based on another rather unusual car, the British Morris Marina.
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Still, it had a strong Giugiaro fastback design and was quite successful, enough to get Hyundai going strong. You can see that Hyundai was really looking at the strength of the base design here, and I think it’s impressive how they chose to update the design vocabulary while keeping the original character intact.
Hyundai used a real original Pony and chose to keep the body panels unchanged, so other elements, such as lighting, take on special importance. I really like how the square chrome bezels around the original lights translated into LED DRL of the new EV version:
And, even cooler, it looks like when the main headlights come on, it looks like the light pattern is reversed to illuminate the round lamp. He is smart and funny.
At the back, we have a dot matrix design for the rear lights, which feels both futuristic and fresh from the 80s, an impressive success:
I think it could be argued that the cleaner, more lined approach to the original design helps create a truly pure version of the look of the car, perhaps something that comes even closer to the root source of the look written by ItalDesign of the Pony.
Inside, we have Nixie’s amazing tube script: honestly, in the 70s and 80s, a seven-segment VFD script would have been more likely to exist, but I’ll never say no to Nixies. Look how amazing this looks:
In addition, there is also a fantastic roll-up window design.
Not many technical details have been given about the car, apart from its life as a real Pony and with a new EV transmission system.
It’s now on display at Hyundai’s new customer service center in Busan, so if you’re near the southeast coast of South Korea, I think you should go check it out.
It was a big surprise, Hyundai! A good cheap EV that looks like it would be great in America, I bet, if you’re curious.