Hi there, welcome to the Optional Extra video for the Hyundai Pony. There's a link to the
original video up in the... up there somewhere anyway! The inspiration for doing this video was
a Panorama documentary that I saw recently. It's a 1975 or so documentary where they go to Korea and
see George Turnbull and the people who went out there - all the British people, ex-British
engineers going out and actually working there. And basically it's a video talking about the
British car malaise. The whole sort of thing they're talking about here is that they think
that the Korean car industry is just going to take off like the Japanese car industry and
they're just going to just decimate the British car industry, because of all the labour problems,
all the fact that British Leyland doesn't know what it's doing. They've just gone bankrupt,
probably just gone bankrupt to the point when they're doing this documentary, so that's
what they're trying to talk about. It's inevitable almost that Britain's car industry is going to
destroy itself. And of course a lot of this stuff did come to pass but it wasn't
quite that they... I think they accentuated the Korean car industry at the time. I think they thought
it was going to be a little bit more inevitable than it was. As I tried to show in the video
they didn't do as well as maybe people thought, and it took them a long time to get going.
So some videos that I create are relatively easy to research. I look at
a few sources and it kind of writes itself. It's a fairly clear thing because of all the
excellent journalism which I'm looking at, of work that people have already done. This one really
wasn't like that. It was pretty hard to research because a lot of the sources... the Korean
sources sort of tell more about what actually happened, and even then there's not a lot of great
information. You had to piece it together from contemporary stuff, from that Panorama documentary
just going through and seeing things that they said, and then try and corroborate it with other
Korean sources and things like that. The British sources or the English sources that I see really
just talk about George Turnbull and so I don't really want to give the impression of Colonial
Brits entering on shining white horses and telling Johnny Foreigner what to do. This does a massive
disservice to the excellent Korean engineers. Over time of course as we see they became more than a
match for British engineers. So it's really nice to be able to piece all this stuff together and
tell it to an English audience, a lot of a lot of whom probably don't know this story already.
So I did a couple of pages where I went down this path talking about it really from the
English perspective. The idea being that it was essentially a Morris Marina, or that George
Turnbull came in and basically started designing the car, and then I realised "Oh they've done a
whole design in... Giorgetto Giugiaro's done this whole design already", and so how could they have
done all this when essentially they had a car already. So some sources say that essentially
it was a Morris Marina - the Hyundai Pony was a Morris Marina, and when I talk about the Morris
Marina video I sort of imply that, because that's the information I had at the time. If you go
on the ItalDesign website, Giorgetto Giugiaro's ItalDesign website it says it's a modified Lancer
chassis. Korean sources also say that it's a modified Lancer chassis, but was it just
a Mitsubishi Lancer with a few changes. How much was it changed? The Panorama documentary said it
used the Lancer transaxle and they seem to imply that's the only part of it that's a Mitsubishi
Lancer, other than the engine of gearbox of course. So again how much of a new car was this?
And it's still not entirely clear exactly what it is or what it isn't. So I went with the idea
being that it was essentially a Mitsubishi Lancer chassis that they used as starting point and then
they did modifications and made it into their own car which is probably close to the truth.
So Giorgetto Giugiaro gave an interview about the Pony and the work that he did designing it in 2019
and it really shows an insight into the mind of a stylist and the things that he
or she needs to think about, when they're doing styling for a particular product.
He said it had to be inexpensive. It had to be easy to construct.
He had to take into account that maybe they were going to have problems trying to source some of
the parts. It was Korea's first car so this was a car that was going to make a nation dream. And he
shows that stylists are more than just artists, that just draw pretty pictures. They have to
understand engineering. They have to understand planning. They have to understand manufacturing,
and of course the level of manufacturing that that a car company can do. They have to understand
the process as a whole. So it was a really interesting insight into the mind of a stylist.
So when it comes to the name the Hyundai Pony, of course I made a joke in the video about it being
called Pony McPonyface after the Boaty McBoatface disaster, but I think being called a Pony was
maybe a play on the idea being that they'd been working for Ford previously. Ford made the Mustang
and Pony is sort of a young horse, a young Mustang, and likewise Hyundai was learning.
They were young, they were growing and eventually they were taking baby steps.
One thing of course, I've talked about George Turnbull and the other people that were the
western people who were in it, but there's not a lot of information about the excellent
Korean engineers and people who did the work. One of them, the one we really know about of course
is the CEO of Hyundai Motors Jeong Sei-Young. He was actually the younger brother of the person who
ran the whole Hyundai corporation. So in some ways it's keeping it all in the family, but he
had a lot to prove. This was a brand new part of the business. It had to be profitable and so
he was probably under a lot of pressure to try and make a very successful company.
So by 1982 the Pony's been out for about seven years. They do this update but it's really
looking out of date. If you're looking at say the Ford Escort, the mk3 Ford Escort that came out,
it was just light years ahead both in styling, type of materials they're using, and of course
Hyundai just don't have enough money. They've spent all their money trying to make this car
that was going to sell 100 000 every year. But it sold half of that every year, so there's a lack
of sales which means of course there's a lack of investment into new models. All the UK engineers
had gone home and although they weren't the be all and end all of it the Korean engineers were
ramping up quickly and had to learn fast. So was it better for Hyundai to try and make their own
car in the mid-70s? Was it the right move? They'd done all this work with Ford but essentially they
were just assembling cars. Did they bite off more than they could chew trying to make their own car?
It was an interesting idea but if you look at the mid-80s to mid-90s they had to take a step back
and essentially just take Mitsubishi cars, do a little bit of ItalDesign styling on them and
then sell them as Hyundais. It was probably in my mind the best thing to do if they'd done that
in the mid-70s to maybe 1990 or so, to just try doing that because Mitsubishi had good solid cars
that would have allowed Hyundai to create much more successful cars because they would have
been known for cars that would have not rusted and lasted longer. But anyway we'll never know,
but it was a fascinating video. I hope you enjoyed watching it and I'll see you in the next video!