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Insider trading ahead of Hyundai-Kia MPG debacle suspected

Reuters is reporting that large-scale insider trading may be at the heart of some particularly fishy stock-selling behavior, just prior to the original announcement about the Hyundai-Kia fuel economy ratings debacle.
On November 1st, Hyundai-Kia shares traded roughly 2.2 million times (the single highest-volume day of the year), and the stock price fell by about four percent. For reference, a standard daily trading volume for the stock in 2012 saw about 600k shares trading hands. On November 2nd, the company made public the bad news about the dropping fuel economy ratings for many of its models. In other words: No one outside of the company (and only a smallish group inside the company, we'd imagine) should have known anything about the impending bad news as of the first day of November. After the announcement, the stock price tanked, as you'd expect, and trading volume was way down as well.
Experts seem fully aware that the whole thing reeks of leaked information and subsequent insider trading. If chicanery on this sort of scale seems wacky to you, you'd be inline with the experts who report to Reuters that the level of trading is absolutely suspicious.

Hyundai reveals flying car among other wacky concepts [w/video]

Hyundai has held an IDEA festival for the past three years that gives its engineers a break from seat belts, and electrical harnesses and wheel arch moldings. Each festival serves up a theme for personal mobility, after that there's no limit - competing teams can come up with anything that serves the theme and are encouraged to get creative.
That's how you get concepts like the E4U 'egg car' (pictured); a single-stander mode of transportation that channels Mork from Ork. The oddest thing about the egg is not the yellow shell but the helmet the 'driver' wears. Other ideas included a flying car with 16 (!) rotors, a bicycle that could serve as a spare tire and a car with five joints. Although most appeared totally impractical, all were totally cool.
This year's festival is in the works, the theme being the rather ambiguous "R&D for customers," the point is apparently to come up with concepts that Hyundai customers might actually use. There's a video with scenes of last year's festival and a press release below (our vote goes to the Pandora).

Hyundai's zombie obsession is just good business

In case you somehow missed it, Hyundai has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with The Walking Dead, the critically acclaimed zombie apocalypse show that entertains the masses while they're waiting for the next season of Game of Thrones. Fans of the show will recognize Rick, Michonne, Carol, Maggie and Glenn's mint green Hyundai Tucson, a staple vehicle for the crew of survivors, but the relationship between manufacturer and show goes far beyond that. There's a whole line of Zombie Survival Machines, as well as a special-edition production model (shown above). Heck, even Hyundai's post-LA Auto Show party featured actors staggering about as startlingly realistic walkers (TWD's name for zombies).
So what is it about the dead that quickens the pulse of Hyundai's marketing department? Ward's Auto has a great interview with Steve Shannon, the brand's US vice president of marketing. In it, Shannon describes the sudden nature of the tie-in between the show and the automaker, while describing how the company's corporate overlords in South Korea saw the results of the deal. It's an interesting insight into automotive product placement, as well as Hyundai's marketing philosophy and plans for the future (spoiler alert: the Tucson, which has had a role in the show for several seasons, was seemingly abandoned at the end of season four).
Head over to Ward's and have a look.