This magazine’s point man was given a “variety show” run-through of Hyundai’s activities and facilities on its home ground.
APPARENTLY I was a member of “2016 global top media”, so said the name tag issued by the earnest Korean hosts.
Frankly, I would be more comfortable describing Hyundai Motor as a 2016 global top manufacturer of cars.
Hard facts justify the description. Almost five million Hyundai motorcars were sold last year (of which nearly a million units were accounted for by the Elantra/Avante alone); the stylised “H” has a brand value of over US$11 billion in 2015 (according to Interbrand), parking it between Ford and Canon; and Hyundai’s vehicles and technologies have won numerous awards around the world.
Hard numbers justify the description, too. The Ulsan Plant is said to be the largest single complex of its kind; the company’s total staff strength is 110,000, of which 11,000 are researchers working in Namyang Technology Research Centre; and the automaker’s California proving ground has a total area of about 3.5 Sentosas.
The island resort analogy ends there, because this media jaunt wasn’t a summer junket with sun, sand, sea and kimchi.
The two-day excursion was so fast-paced at some points, it felt like the “package tour” equivalent of the i20 World Rally Car’s racing sequential transmission.
There was so much to do, “Seoul” many Korean things to see and too much to digest, like trying to finish a big stone bowl of bibimbap.
On the first day, the whirlwind trip became really windy when I entered the wind tunnel of Namyang R&D Centre and the engineers turned the fan on.
The so-called Aerodynamic Test Building can generate a maximum wind speed of 200km/h, but something in the wind was more interesting when I was there – a Honda HR-V, bearing Korean registration plates and possibly used for comparison testing.
Interesting, too, were the recreational facilities within the Namyang research complex, which has more than 100 buildings and 12,000 staff.
Our Korean guide said: “This place is far from city, so we have swimming pool, football, baseball, basketball… You can enjoy all sports here!”
“Hyundai’s massive steel mill can serve as a cinematic backdrop for a postapocalyptic tear-jerker or a big bang music video.”
You can also enjoy sports driving here, because the place has about 40 different road-test roads that include a 4.5km highspeed circuit.
But my group of visitors was limited to a few kilometres of flat and straight tarmac, on which to test-drive four Hyundai cars in a flat-out straight line.
Two of them were Ioniqs (petrol-electric and pure electric), one was a turbo-diesel Santa Fe and the fourth was a Genesis Equus EQ900, a Korean domestic limousine for big bosses who use Korean smartphones to conduct their big business in a smart manner.
I only managed to drive the Ioniqs before the exercise was cut and we had to board the Hyundai Universe bus again.
Not sampling the Santa Fe wasn’t a disaster, but not trying the 5-litre V8 EQ900 was as disappointing as missing a hot date with an all-singing, all-dancing K-pop queen who has a high EQ.
My next stop was Hyundai Motorstudio, the company’s downtown “experimental lab that incorporates culture and lifestyle, and transforms ordinary lives into special journeys”.
It’s like a hipster hangout for people who have a passion for cars, or passers-by who have a passing interest in cars.
The sleek five-storey building with full-height windows has an art space on the ground floor, a café and library on the second, and a three-level gallery housing cars (some of which are displayed in mid-air by rotators), exhibits and lounges.
One of the areas is for kids, who’ll hopefully grow up to buy 1:1 scale Hyundai (or Kia) cars instead of the tiny ones they get to play in there.
Another lounge area, TUIX (short for Tuning Is Innovation & Expression), is for overgrown kids who wish to customise their Hyundai with performance/ decoration components.
The in-house library has a collection of over 2500 books and magazines. Most of them are about cars (both Korean and foreign), of course, including a comprehensive selection of Hyundai workshop manuals that date back to the 1980s!
The shelves also have arty reading material on fashion, travel, arts and sciences, maybe because hipster drivers prefer freshly printed coffee table books to go with their freshly roasted coffee beans.
A huge mug of steaming, thick coffee was exactly what I needed the next morning when the whirlwind trip continued apace. The caffeine hit kept my eyes open, and my tired eyes opened wider when I reached Dangjin Integrated Steelworks after a 90-minute bus ride.
Hyundai’s mecca of metal is a mini-city roughly the size of Bukit Merah, with its own port, roads and railways.
“There was so much to do, “Seoul” many korean things to see and too much to digest, like trying to finish a big stone bowl of bibimbap.”
This is where high-quality South Korean steel in all its raw forms – sheet, plate, pipe, bar, roll, coil – is produced for the manufacture of vehicles, ships, buildings and structures, plus machine tools and consumer electronics.
Amazingly, the place is no dustier than Tuas despite all the activity and machinery.
It’s because of excellent housekeeping on an industrial scale – the iron ore and coal are moved from the port/boat to the blast furnaces and fully enclosed, dome-shaped silos on airtight conveyor belts.
Raw materials are therefore not scattered en route (which harms the local environment) and wasted along the way (which harms the bottom line).
The molten iron and sintered/ smelted derivatives are transported to the other stages of the mill’s steel-making process in a similarly dust-free manner.
The relatively eco-friendly facility also has an electric arc furnace that turns/burns scrap steel and iron by-products into reinforcing bars and other basic steel products for construction purposes worldwide.
So, after you say ta-ta to your Sonata at the scrapyard, it might only be the beginning of the end for your trusty saloon, whose old steel could become part of the structural reinforcement for a newly built multi-storey carpark somewhere in Asia.
“Not trying the 5-litre V8 EQ900 was as disappointing as missing a hot date with an all-singing, all-dancing K-pop queen who has a high EQ.”
Some Asian food for thought there. Another idea I pondered: With its grunge rock appearance and heavy/groovy metal columns everywhere, Hyundai’s massive steel mill can also serve as a cinematic backdrop for a sci-fithriller, a post-apocalyptic tearjerker or a Big Bang music video. But according to the Hyundai Steel tour guide, the premises have never been used for filming.
I reckon that Asan Plant, my last stop, has never been used for filming either, because the look and layout were nothing special compared to every other car factory I’ve ever visited.
The sounds were familiar, too – various melodies and beeps serving as friendly alerts, robots whirring as they were working, countless cars in different phases of production.
If not for the Korean signs/ slogans (including “I Can’t, We Can!” in the restrooms), it could have been a Japanese car factory, albeit with a little less uniformity in the attire of the assembly line crew.
Hyundai’s Asan Plant makes 1100 cars per day – a mix of Sonata, Grandeur/Azera and Aslan. Yes, Asan makes Aslans.
Equally impressive is the plant’s 10-megawatt rooftop solar array, which generates clean extra energy to reduce the factory’s carbon emissions and add to the power grid for the Asan region.
After two days of all that running around with Korean executives, bingeing on Korean buffets and drinking more soju than I should on a work trip, I saw where Hyundai is going with its Modern Premium philosophy and product-focused strategy.
Keep running, enthusiastic suited Korean men.
