Hyundai, like most car companies, wants to try and get younger buyers interested in its brand. It's easy enough to grab the attention of the over-forties; you just offer them a long warranty and a low purchase price and bada-bing, job done and you're the fastest growing car maker in Europe. Getting the twenty-something, always-connected smartphone crowd to glance up from the TFT screens and take interest in a passing car is somewhat harder though, so to try and get around this problem, Hyundai has gone down something of a traditional route. It's calling in the Italians.
Just as the likes of Morris, Austin, Triumph, Peugeot, Chrysler and others have previously realised, so Hyundai has taken note that the Italians know a thing or two about car design and so the Koreans have teamed up with the Istituto Europeo di Design, better known as IED. IED is a design school (rather similar to England's Royal College of Art) and has a long and glorious association with the car industry, having worked in the past with pretty much everyone from Abarth to Zagato.
Together, the two have come up with this: the PassoCorto, a mid-engined two-seat sports car that's specifically designed to engage with those phone-fanatic Generation Y kids. The car, which will be shown in Geneva as a one-tenth scale model, is the work of two teams working under the direction of the Master's course, which is coordinated by Luca Borgogno, Lead Designer at Pininfarina no less. The teams came up with two separate proposals that were then carefully integrated so that the finished item is roughly 70 per cent of one proposal, 30 per cent of the other.
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Is Hyundai actually serious about a production version? Probably not, as a mid-engined car would be ruinously expensive to engineer for a company that only really makes front-drive hatches, saloons and four-wheel drive SUVs (and the occasional rear-drive V8 for the American market). That said, it is possible that some of the design elements of the car may well appear on the next-generation Veloster - or Hyundai could decide to piggy-back on sister company Kia's plans for a sporty, affordable rear-drive coupé to compete with the Toyota GT86...