If your neighbour mentioned in passing that he was shopping for a new car and considering a Hyundai, it’s unlikely that you’d be startled or surprised. While there’s still plenty of conversation to be had about whether a Honda or Toyota might have a little more brand cachet, based mostly on past reputation, Hyundai is by now a well-established manufacturer of all kinds of passenger cars. Perhaps you yourself daily a Santa Fe while a beloved MG awaits the arrival of spring, tucked away in the garage, or maybe your niece leased an Kona as dependable transportation upon getting her first job out of college. While the N-branded vehicles stand out as notable exceptions, there is nothing particularly remarkable about your average Hyundai, and that should be taken as the highest compliment. Buying a Hyundai today is not risky. But 50 years ago, the company made a hell of a gamble.
This year marks a milestone anniversary for the South Korean automotive industry, as it is the 50th anniversary of the Hyundai Pony. Canadians in the audience may have already started to snicker, as the second-generation Pony was sold there beginning in 1983, and it proved itself something of a laughingstock. We’ll get to that a little later.
However, in the Republic of Korea, the original Pony is venerated, to the point that you’ll find digitised versions showing up in multiplayer avatar-based online social games. At Hyundai’s showrooms in Seoul, you can buy a Pony T-shirt or a detailed die-cast model of a Pony. There’s a surprising amount of pride around this simple little car, and for good reason: It was the first proper Korean car.
Of course, poke around a Pony’s engine and suspension, and you start to see that there was as much imitation going on as there was innovation. Nevertheless, it was a breakthrough, and quickly became the people’s car of Korea. As an export model, it is the grandfather of every Tucson or Santa Fe, and the economy car at the root of the Genesis luxury sub-brand. Certainly, then, this is a birthday worth celebrating, especially because the path to the Pony wasn’t easy.
Chung Ju-yung and the 1001 Cows
Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-yung, is perhaps the most inspirational automotive figure you’ve never heard of. He was born in 1915 into abject poverty in what would become North Korea, and was at the time an occupied country, part of the Japanese empire. The eldest of seven children, he worked on the family farm from a very early age.
Ju-yung grated under the oppressive yoke of a life of subsistence farming. There was little time for education, and seemingly few other ways out. On occasional trips to a nearby town, he couldn’t help but contrast his stultifying rural life with the bustle of people. So he ran away. A lot.
Beginning when he was 16, Ju-yung fled the family farm at least four times, the first three resulting in being soon found and forced back home by his father. However, during these escapes, he managed to find basic construction work, and also picked up some classes in bookkeeping. For one of the escapes, he sold a cow belonging to his father for money to buy a train ticket.
The fourth escape attempt, made at the age of 18, secured his path to a new life. After working as a labourer, he got a job at a small rice store, where he was such a diligent worker that the store’s owner gave him more and more responsibility. When the owner fell ill in 1937, he transferred ownership of the store to Ju-yung, who ran it successfully for two years before the Japanese occupying forces imposed rice rationing.
Here’s where the first germination of Hyundai as an automotive company begins. Looking around to see what opportunities were actually afforded to Koreans under Japanese rule, Ju-yung hit on automobile repair. He opened the A-do service garage, growing the company rapidly and more than tripling its workforce. Wartime restrictions put him out of business once more, but he had managed to set aside enough money for seed capital once World War Two ended.
Two years after the end of the war, Ju-yung founded the Hyundai Engineering and Construction Company. He landed several government contracts for building highways and other infrastructure, and managed to survive the Korean war. He founded the Hyundai Motor Corporation in 1967, and would go on to become the richest man in South Korea.
Ju-yung’s life is noted for both immense philanthropic efforts and his work to ease tensions between the North and South Koreas. Along with setting up foundations that built hospitals and ran scholarships, he helped behind-the-scenes to get loans to North Korea in the late 1990s. In 1998, he became the first civilian to officially cross the demilitarised into North Korea, making two trips in which he brought 1001 indigenous Korean cattle (a breed called Hanwoo), repaying that long-ago debt to his father a thousand times over.
The Ford Cortina and the Miracle on the Han River
At the time of founding of Hyundai as an automotive company, its parent brand was already established as a chaebol, or a large company managed by a family dynasty. These are very similar to the Japanese system of zaibatsu, or you can of course think of the fictional family at the heart of Succession.
By the early 1960s, Korea already had a nascent automotive industry, including the then fully independent Kia. Today Kia has a close partnership with Hyundai, but in those days it was building licenced small cars and trucks in partnership with Mazda, and even a line of licenced Honda motorcycles.
At that point, South Korea’s economy was outperforming that of North Korea, but only barely. Politicians pointed to the rapid rise of West Germany – the Wirtschaftswunder – as a trend to be emulated. A military coup led to the dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee, who would run the country until his assassination in 1979. Under his authority, a series of five-year plans aimed to grow the economy were implemented.
Hyundai’s expertise in construction was key to its entry into the automotive sphere. After discussions with Ford, an agreement was made to assemble complete knockdown kits (CKD) of the Ford Cortina. This would be the start of a long partnership between Hyundai and Ford, the former building licenced Ford Granadas all the way into the mid-1980s.
The factory that would assemble the Cortina was up and producing cars in an incredibly short six months. Hyundai’s construction engineers, workers, and a team of Ford engineers all lived together on-site during the build, putting in sixteen-hour days without pause.
This sort of relentless labour sparked the roaring economic furnace that the Republic of Korea still enjoys today. Having come through occupation, war, and deprivation, the workforce was eager to set their shoulders against the wheel.
The British Invasion
Tasked by government officials to create a more domestically produced car, Hyundai sought out expertise from the UK. It seems strange today to be asking the British Leyland of the mid-1970s how to build cars – one tends to think of the memorable Top Gear cheap British Leyland challenge episode, where Jeremy Clarkson opened the door of his Rover SD1 only to have the interior panel wedge in the door frame.
However, while labour relations and boardroom battles marred this era of automaking in the UK, British Leyland’s execs still knew how to get things done. Hyundai successfully lured over Sir George Turnbull, who was at loose ends following his resignation as managing director of BL. Turnbull had performed his own economic miracle over a couple of previous years running Austin-Morris, taking it from multi-million pound losing concern to overall profitability. Rolls-Royce even offered him a position in its aero engine division, but he saw the opportunity to do something unique with the Koreans.
The task was monstrous. This new car had to be designed from scratch, and the brand new factory that would eventually build it was then just empty waste ground – a swamp, in fact. However, Turnbull had taken a parting gift from British Leyland with him: two Morris Marinas. He also persuaded a small team of British engineers to join him in Korea, men from Girling Brakes and Vauxhall.
Turnbull deployed his forces like a general, scouring the world to collect the best manufacturing equipment then available. The sheetmetal presses came from France, some of the welding equipment came from British Leyland, and a deal was struck to use Mitsubishi-sourced engines.
Arriving at the just-opened factory in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental, Turnbull oversaw a traditional Korean blessing ceremony to open it. From ground-breaking to mass production took just under one year, though it’s worth noting that the factory did not have functional heating even as cars started rolling off the line. (In an interesting footnote, Turnbull would later end up also being responsible for Iran’s people’s car, the Paykan.)
The Pony Car
By 1975 standards, the first Pony was a very conventional car, in the spirit of a contemporary Mazda GLC. Styling was by Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign, who penned the original as a coupe concept, shown at the 1974 Turin auto show. The production version was a four-door saloon, soon joined by a pickup-like utility coupe, and a useful four-door hatchback.
The layout was very conventional for the time: front-mounted engine, rear-wheel-drive, modest four-cylinder power. Transmission choice was a four-speed manual or eventually a three-speed automatic, and performance was nothing to shout about. First-generation Ponys were imported into the UK, and one British magazine clocked a 0–60 mph time of 15.3 seconds.
Part of the reason Hyundai doesn’t celebrate its Pony more in North America is perhaps its boom-and-bust arrival in the Canadian market. It was introduced at the very low price of $5900 and was one of the best-selling cars in Canada in 1984. Problem was, Canadian winters were even tougher than Korean ones, and the Pony suffered a high attrition rate. Even so, with more than 25,000 sold in 1984, they were a common sight on the road for decades. In the 1995 Jackie Chan movie, Rumble in the Bronx, which has Vancouver standing in for New York City, you can see Hyundai Ponys driving past about once every five minutes.
They are nearly all gone now. Some years back, I tracked down a low-mileage example that had been recently acquired by a Korean-Canadian man who planned to ship the car back to Seoul. It was a GL model with the 70-horse 1.4-litre engine, minimal options, and a manual transmission (it didn’t even have a tachometer).
Having also driven a well-preserved Mazda GLC owned by Mazda of North America, the economy-car similarities were obvious. The difference is that the Hyundai was almost a decade older than the Mazda, but felt at the same technological level. The Pony was fine as a 1970s car, but considering how quickly the Honda Civic was developing in the 1980s, it was outclassed.
And yet, the Pony managed to persevere. It would take Hyundai decades to shed its economy-minded roots, just as had been the case with the Japanese marques earlier, but there were good cars here and there within the subsequent Hyundai lineup. The V6 Tiburon coupe was a bit interesting. As was the rear-wheel-drive Genesis coupe you could get with a turbo-four or a V6 and a manual gearbox. A little overlooked.
Today, Hyundai seems to be vacillating a little on whether or not to build a production version of the N Vision 74 concept. Powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and battery pack, it takes the original Pony coupe concept into the future, putting 670bhp to the rear wheels. In a world where the crossover is king, it’s one of the most exciting vehicles of the last few years.
Should that not come to fruition, the ulitmate Pony does exist. Khyzyl Saleem, the designer behind the TWR Supercat, penned a widebody drift car based on a Pony hatchback, complete with the 2.0L turbocharged four-cylinder out of a Genesis Coupe, good for around 420bhp. Built by Peaches, a fashion brand out of Korea, it was shown off last year at an event in Poland.
At 50, the Hyundai Pony seems an unlikely icon. But for Hyundai to become the third-largest automaker in the world, it had to start by building its first car. Here’s hoping the Vision 74 makes it into production. It’d be a well-deserved birthday present for a little economy car that could, and did.
