Hyundai design shifts to a culture that questions the status quo

HWASEONG, South Korea — From their upstairs office in Hyundai's sunlit design center, styling bosses Luc Donckerwolke and SangYup Lee can keep an eye on everything. Literally.

The design duo peer through glass walls at people buzzing away in nearly every division, from advanced design and interior to exterior styling, and even into the airy indoor presentation arena and the outside viewing deck beyond that.

The two share the same space and sit at the same table, next to each other. They, too, are surrounded by glass, on view to one and all designers.

"We can be seen from any corner of the building," Lee said. "I can't even pick my nose at work."

All that transparency at Hyundai's 1½- year-old design center is in no small way symbolic.

Hyundai has embarked on a styling overhaul that represents a profound philosophical change in corporate culture.

To recapture the brand's reputation for eye-catching cars, the automaker wants to ditch its traditional top-down Korean business culture and instead cultivate fresh creativity with a flatter, free-flow approach that questions the status quo.

"We are changing it from a 'Yes, sir!' organization to a 'Why not?' organization," Lee said.

The first fruits are on display in the new Palisade crossover and the redesigned, eighth-generation Sonata sedan, unveiled last week with plans to hit U.S. showrooms in October.

The emerging design language, called Sensuous Sportiness, prioritizes performance and incorporates upscale flourishes and new technology, especially the use of lighting as an external styling motif.

Gone will be the cookie-cutter "family look" that defined previous generations of Hyundais, that yielded different nameplates that looked like scaled up or shrunk down versions of each other. Every model and every segment will now get its own aesthetic, better tailored to the target customer.

At the center of the shift is a new digitized design process that integrates Hyundai's studio with its engineering center from the beginning of projects. Hyundai is betting that by sharing styling data early, engineers can better indulge the more fanciful visions of designers, all while slashing lead times.

For designers, this coming together also means leaving their comfort zone. For starters, anyone present at a meeting is expected to voice an opinion. There are no wallflowers. Cross-fertilization of ideas is key.

"If you don't talk, don't come to the meeting," Lee described the new attitude in a conversation with Automotive News last month at the design center here at the Hyundai Motor Group's global r&d center south of Seoul. "It's very disruptive in Asian culture, which is all about hierarchy. But for me, it's the only way."

The new premium on openness and transparency is especially hard on company veterans who came from a tradition of master craftsmanship, which expected apprentices to defer to their superiors.

"If someone has been doing this design work for 10 years, it's difficult to change," Lee said.

"But what's important is, it's OK to say 'no,' to voice your objections. We've started a whole organizational change, with the younger people. And this virus is spreading, little by little."

The new mindset shines through in the upcoming Sonata.

Its rear-slung silhouette was foreshadowed in the Le Fil Rouge four-door coupe concept shown at last year's Geneva auto show. Its sloped roofline and short front overhang lend it a performance look, in contrast to today's more staid, stolid Sonata. The more pronounced sculpted sides hark back to the sixth-generation Sonata that turned heads with its dynamic creasing.

The car keeps its front-wheel-drive layout but takes on a more substantial stance approaching that of a rear-wheel-drive vehicle, thanks partly to the new platform. It allows the engine to be moved rearward several centimeters, helping reduce the clunky front overhang common in fwd offerings.

The new look also uses so-called hidden lighting lamps for the daytime running lights, which wrap around the headlights in an arrow shape.

In the daytime, they look like normal chrome stripping, part of a styling flourish that reaches up the sides of the hood and connects with the stripping around the cabin doors.

But at night, lights from under the strip illuminate in a striking gradient.

Hyundai calls this "light architecture" and says it will be a defining feature of future design.

"This is only the beginning," Lee said.

Early interaction between the design and engineering teams, through the new digitized design-engineering process, brings both sides together from the start. For the Sonata project, that enabled both sides to negotiate the repositioning of the front shock-absorber towers. As a result, designers could strip out front-fender bulk and achieve rounded front corners that cleave close to the tires.

The team approach allowed designers to lower the Sonata's hood by 1.6 inches, said Donckerwolke, chief design officer for the Hyundai Motor Group.

"This is the big advantage of what we call data-driven design," Donckerwolke said. "We are basically working simultaneously — from the very beginning."

It has the added benefit of shortening project lead times by as much as six months, he added.

Technology plays a big role in the transformation.

In November, Hyundai converted its old vehicle presentation space into a virtual reality auditorium for viewing realistic 3D virtual models. It allows design teams in Europe, America and South Korea to simultaneously work on the same project.

Going virtual is already helping speed the design process by doing away with costly and time-consuming clay models. Hyundai expects to go 100 percent digital with commercial vehicles and scrap real-world modeling because of their size and expense.

"We do about 100 projects a year, so that means we have to be more efficient," Donckerwolke said. "It was about looking at the whole process and starting over from scratch."