Hyundai no longer the Dangerfield of cars

Dan Carney • E-mail

After two decades of offering shoddy, disappointing, and short-lived cars in the U.S., Hyundai is finding it an uphill battle to convince consumers that its products really are good now.

Quality scores have soared and hands-on tests of Hyundai models introduced in the last five years have been worlds apart from earlier tests, but consumers remain skeptical — and it is hard to blame them.

What the company needs is a new product that embodies improved quality, but also one that appeals to a customer for whom product features are more important than brand image or historical reliability. What it needs is a product targeting a group so determined that it would make excuses about the unreliability of Italian sports cars or rationalize the inability of British sports cars to keep the rain off their heads.

What Hyundai needs is a sports car. Performance enthusiasts would drive hot-rod Yugos if they were truly fast, as demonstrated by the buzz Chrysler created in the late ’80s with its turbocharged economy car junkboxes, such as the Dodge Omni Shelby GLHS. That car went like stink. And looked like it, too.

This game plan has worked before. Four decades ago, a lightly regarded Asian car maker broke into the big leagues in the U.S. by introducing a sport coupe that directly challenged the established order by offering fresh styling and exhilarating performance at a bargain price.

The Datsun 240Z’s value proposition so crushed the snooty Jaguar E-Type that the English company fled the sports car segment entirely (until it returns next year) for the safer confines of the cushy grand-touring market.

It would be an exaggeration to call Hyundai an upstart, but decades of maladroit product quality has left the company with a dreadful brand image among consumers. To offer a genuinely desirable and exciting model is a huge advance for Hyundai, one that could catalyze perceptions of Hyundai the way the Z-car shifted the conventional wisdom of Datsun 40 years ago.

Hyundai’s Genesis Coupe employs much of the rear-wheel-drive hardware that underpins the larger Genesis sedan, giving it the powertrain layout needed for more dynamic driving characteristics enthusiasts prefer. 

Although the sedan is a nice product, Hyundai’s attempt to position it against prestigious European competitors is doomed to fail because prestige sedan buyers demand, well, prestige. 

Hyundai has recently demonstrated an impressive dedication to product quality, both in terms of durability of construction and product usability, and the company has seen its quality ratings climb correspondingly. But earlier in this decade, it was Hyundai’s strategy to engage in spec-sheet competition, listing all the check-off boxes it could for each product. This is the approach employed by bored 14-year-old Internet flame warriors arguing the automotive version of whether Batman could beat Superman in a fight.

While the specs provide ammunition to geeks who send scathing e-mails arguing with those who actually drive the cars and have some basis in fact for rating them, they prove to be largely irrelevant in the real world.

What good was having a Hyundai V6 engine if Honda’s four-cylinder was smoother, quieter and more powerful at the time? So when Hyundai announced the Genesis Coupe, with powerful engines, modest curb weight and rear drive, the specifications had to be viewed with a hopeful skepticism. Fortunately the company’s new dedication to quality has produced exactly the kind of sport coupe enthusiasts would hope for.

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