It was unexpected, but lovely, kind of like finding the last one brown rye cracker thing in a bag of Chex Mix that you thought you had already escaped completely. “This” I mean is an old Hyundai Pony from the ’70s, which was turned into an EV and renamed by Hak Soo Ha, the main interior designer of Hyundai, and appeared on Instagram. It’s a real old pony and I think the upgrades to it – which are mostly modern but include some Nixie tubes on the board – are all very smart and look great.
Hyundai Pony never came to America – I only received Hyundais after their initial car-building efforts, when they moved from rear-wheel drive to Excel front-wheel drive Excel.
Pony was the first car built in South Korea in very large quantities and the first to be exported in any number. Built from 1975 to 1990, it was not exactly a That’s great car because it was roughly based on another rather unusual car, the British Morris Marina.
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However, it had a rough Giugiaro fastback design and was quite successful, enough for Hyundai to become strong. You can see that Hyundai is really looking at the strength of the basic design here, and the way they chose to update the design vocabulary while keeping the original character intact, I think is really impressive.
Hyundai used an original Pony and opted to keep the body panels largely unchanged, so other elements, such as lighting, become particularly important. I really like the way the chrome square frames around the original lights have been translated into DRL LEDs on the new EV version:
And, even colder, it seems that when the main headlights come on, it seems that the light pattern is reversed to illuminate the round lamp. It’s smart and fun.
At the back, we have a dot matrix design for taillights, which feels both futuristic and cool in the ’80s simultaneously, an impressive achievement:
I think you could argue that the cleaner and less ornate approach to the original design helps create a truly pure version of the car’s look, perhaps something that is even closer to the root source of Pony’s ItalDesign-written look.
Inside, we have the amazing Nixie tube line – honestly, in the ’70s and’ 80s, a seven-segment VFD dash type would have been more likely, but I’ll never say no to Nixies. Here’s how amazing this looks:
Also, the fantastic design of the roll-up windows there.
Not much technical details were given about the car other than the fact that it started life as a Pony proper and has a new EV transmission.
It’s now on display at the new Hyundai customer center in Busan, so if you’re somewhere off 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 this would be great in America, I bet, if you’re curious.