Hyundai designer sketches ute, coupe

Manufacturers usually carefully screen-off their product design studios from prying eyes but the Creative Design Manager of Hyundai's Design Planning & Management Team, Casey Hyun, has offered a tantalising peep-hole into the Korean company’s design future.

Hyun, an Australian-born graduate of design at the University of Technology Sydney, was in Australia this week to give the keynote speech at Sydney’s Vivid festival and to give journalists an overview of future Hyundai design.

Hyun sketched two cars that looked remarkably like the Santa Cruz lifestyle ute and next-generation Genesis Coupe that the company has already revealed as concepts.

Hyun’s sketches not only provide an insight to future Hyundai design, but also give credence to the concepts that are most likely to become reality.

The four-door dual-cab Santa Cruz concept, revealed at the Detroit motor show in January, is now odds-on to become Hyundai's first ute. Hyundai Motor America CEO Dave Zuchowski recently told The Detroit Bureau that focus groups in the US are in love with the idea of a sporty, compact Hyundai ute.

"There is a very high probability we [will] get the approval of the truck soon," Zuchowski said.

Hyundai Australia’s hopes that the Santa Cruz concept would morph into a rugged, ladder-frame one-tonne ute were dashed when it was confirmed that the production version – like the Santa Cruz concept -- will be based on the same monocoque platform as the Tucson.

Hyundai Oz believes the 'lifestyle' ute would have only 'niche' appeal in Australia, but says it hasn't given up hope of a direct rival for the likes of Toyota's HiLux, the nation's top-selling new vehicle last month.

Providing a telling indication of Hyundai’s current lack of interest in producing a commercial ute, Hyun said: “The ute is interesting; there will always be a demand, but the ute will always stay as a niche-market car.”

However, Hyun admitted he has long had an interest in ute design. At London’s Royal College of Art, where he studied Transportation Design, Hyun based his Master’s Degree on a pick-up and spent nine months of his final year drawing cabs and trays rather than svelte coupe designs.

This interest in ute design -- although Hyun’s extensive design portfolio within Hyundai includes responsibility for overseeing the Eon light car for India and the current Genesis sedan -- gives the Australia/Korean designer the impetus to create a ute that gives such a workhorse “more emotion”.

“Usually, the utes in Australia, [their design is] pretty simple, it’s flat. Some of the aspects that we could a little bit better with the ute is a bit more emotion maybe," he said.

"There’s the thing about the cab being cut-off vertically. We may be able to angle that out. Rather than having a vertical tail-lamp, something horizontal. That would be something that I could definitely see happening.”

Meanwhile, Hyundai has gone quiet on the next Genesis Coupe, which was previewed at the 2013 Seoul motor show as the HND-9 concept.

Yet Hyun’s renderings of what is clearly a two-door coupe revives the prospect that Hyundai could finally replace its original Genesis Coupe, which was first released in 2008 but never sold here. The new coupe is rumoured to arrive by 2017.