2014 Hyundai Elantra Limited on 2040-cars

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Hyundai shows a mysterious coupe design in promo video

You never know where you'll find some interesting automotive news. In this particular case, we found some curious Hyundai info buried in an otherwise painfully boring Hyundai promo video. At about the 1:12 mark in the video, we see footage of a person working on a clay model of a car. It's low, sleek, and looks like it would only have two doors. It appears to have a liftback as well, and fairly aggressive vents in the back. Nothing else in the video indicates what the car is, though. However, we've got some educated guesses. One possibility is that this is a model for the successor to the recently departed Hyundai Genesis Coupe. The short deck and steeply raked rear window and pillars fall right in line with the styling of Hyundai's old sports car, not to mention the bulging rear fenders. Genesis has also made it clear that they intend to have a coupe to replace the old Genesis on sale by 2020. The luxury brand also has a small rear-drive platform in development in the form of the G70 on which it could base the coupe, along with some reasonably potent engines. Last we heard, the twin-turbo 3.3-liter V6 was under consideration. However, an argument against this being a Genesis coupe is that it would be odd to show a Genesis model in a Hyundai video. The companies are clearly trying to put space between each other, so including a Genesis vehicle in this video seems out of step with the two brands' goals. This brings us to the second possibility for this mystery coupe; that it must be a Hyundai of some sort. Hyundai has had very few coupe or coupe-like vehicles in its past. The Tiburon is long dead, thanks to the aforementioned Genesis Coupe, which will have a Genesis-branded successor. The Veloster is coupe-like and due for replacement, but recent spy photos show that it will look more like the current model and not the clay vehicle in the video. That leaves us with just one other coupe it could be: the Elantra coupe. It was killed off for the 2015 model year, but Hyundai might take another stab at it. If the company offered it exclusively with the turbocharged 1.6-liter turbocharged four-cylinder, it could attract a small enthusiast base, with the added advantage that, aside from the Civic Si, it would be the only sporty front-drive coupe on the market. Of course, it could also be something entirely new that isn't connected to any previous Hyundai or Genesis product.

Hyundai shows us two more Super Bowl commercials

Hyundai is gearing up to show five commercials during this year's Super Bowl, and you've probably already seen one of them called Don't Tell that's been airing on television for weeks now. The Korean automaker has released two of the other four ads, though it looks like it might keep the headlining ad for the three-row Santa Fe, called Epic PlayDate, under wraps until the big game.
Of the two ads published on YouTube, we like Stuck the most, which features the Sonata Turbo. It presents all of the horrid things you could be stuck behind on the highway as reason enough for buying a boosted Sonata with its ample passing power.
The other commercial, called Excited, features the 2013 Hyundai Genesis. Our funny bone didn't tingle much with this one, and it contains a grammar bugaboo that's a pet peeve of some editors in the Autoblog virtual offices. Can you spot it? Scroll below to take the challenge and let us know in the comments.

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.