This was unexpected, but delightful, just like finding the latter brown rye cracker thing in a Chex Mix bag that you thought you had already completely wiped out. The ‘this’ I’m referring to is an old 1970s Hyundai Pony that was converted into an electric car and redesigned by Hak Soo Ha, Hyundai’s chief interior designer. and appeared on Instagram. It’s a real old pony, and I think the updates to it – which are mostly modern but do include some Nixie pipes on the dash – are all really smart and look great.
The Hyundai Pony never made it to America – we only got Hyundais after their initial car-building efforts, when they moved from the rear-wheel drive Pony to the front-wheel drive Excel.
The Pony was the first car to be built in really large quantities in South Korea and the first to be exported in any number as well. Built from 1975 to 1990, it wasn’t exactly one very well car, as it was roughly based on another pretty un-great car, the British Morris Marina.
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Still, it had a sharp Giugiaro fastback design and was quite successful, enough to make Hyundai really strong. You can tell Hyundai really looked at the baseline design power here, and the way they chose to update the design vocabulary while keeping the original character is really impressive to me.
Hyundai used a genuine original Pony and chose to leave the body panels largely unchanged so that other elements, such as the lighting, become particularly important. I really like how the square chrome bezels around the original lights were translated into LED DRLs on the new EV version:
And, even cooler, it seems that when the main headlights are turned on, the light pattern appears to be reversed to illuminate the round bulb. It’s smart and fun.
All around we have a dot-matrix design for the rear lights that feels both futuristic and ’80s cool at the same time, an impressive feat:
I think you could argue that the cleaner, less ornamented approach to the original design helps to create a really pure version of the car’s look, perhaps something even closer to the source of the ItalDesign penned- look of the Pony.
Inside, we’ve got the amazing Nixie tube dashboard – frankly, in the ’70s and’ 80s, a seven-segment VFD-type dashboard would have been more likely, but I’m never going to say no to Nixies. Check out how great this looks:
A fantastic roll-up window design there too.
Not much technical detail has really been given about the car, other than that it started out as a real Pony and has a new EV powertrain.
It’s now on display at Hyundai’s new customer center in Busan, so if you’re anywhere near South Korea’s southeast coast, I think you should check this out.
This was a great surprise, Hyundai! A good cheap EV that looks like this would do great in America, I bet if you’re curious.