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Hyundai Motorsport tests its performance at the WRC Rally Finland

Autoblog joined Hyundai to check out the Neste Oil Rally Finland, where thousands of kilometers of lightly traveled, rolling gravel roads have turned out decades of astonishing racing and cold-blooded drivers. Even though the World Rally Championship is well tamed from its feral Group B days, Rally Finland is still the drivers' favorite, with the fastest speeds and the biggest jumps.
It's the rookie year for the Hyundai Shell World Rally Team, run by Hyundai Motorsport out of Alzenau, Germany. The squad entered the season aiming for podiums in the second half and looking to get its three cars to the finish at every race for maximum development data. It's already outdone itself, Thierry Neuville scoring third places in Mexico - where he used a bottle of Corona to fill his radiator - and Poland.
Denis Giraudet told us that the rally's sternest challenge is not one of heart, though. Giraudet isn't part of Hyundai Motorsport, he was our guide and he's been in the sport as a co-driver for more than 30 years; he won Rally Finland with Juha Kankunnen in 1993 in a Toyota Celica Turbo 4WD. Giraudet said the race tests that particular confidence that comes from about 18 inches below the heart: "Here, you have to go all out. If there's a problem, it's usually between the steering wheel and the seat."

How the Blue Link Apple Watch app talks to Hyundai Sonata PHEV

Getting all of our electronic gadgets to talk to each other is the technologist utopia normally called the Internet of Things. Cars are no strangers to this new Internet and that means that your smartphone is getting more and more chatty with any number of vehicles, especially plug-in vehicles. The new 2016 Hyundai Sonata Plug-In Hybrid is the latest that can communicate with your phone, and it also has a new-found ability to talk to smart watches. We talked with Hyundai's manager of connected care publicity, Miles Johnson, about the new features in the Apple Watch app during out recent test drive of the Sonata PHEV. To be honest, there's nothing groundbreaking in the new Blue Link Apple Watch app except that it works on your wrist instead of your palm – you can see the state of charge and be guided to your car in a crowded parking lot – but we're still in favor of anything that makes electric vehicles seem one step ahead of your non-connected ride. You can get an up-close and personal look at the new app's capabilities in the video above and read our first drive of the PHEV and the standard hybrid here.

How Hyundai lost momentum, and will 'take a few years' to recover

SEOUL/DETROIT/CHONGQING, China — At a near-empty Hyundai Motor showroom in the Chinese mega city of Chongqing, the store manager is grumbling about his shortage of customers and a lack of bigger, cheaper SUV models popular in the world's largest auto market. Even with discounting of as much as 25 percent, his dealership was selling barely a hundred vehicles a month, said the manager surnamed Li. A nearby Nissan dealership was selling about 400 vehicles a month, a store manager there said. "The sales are simply poor," Li told Reuters. "Look at the Nissan store next door, they have tens of customers while we just have two." An hour's drive away is Hyundai's massive $1 billion manufacturing plant, which opened last year with a target to produce 300,000 vehicles per year. But with sales weak and the Chinese auto market slowing sharply, the factory is running at roughly 30 percent of capacity, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The sources asked not to be identified because the information was not public. Hyundai, the world's fifth largest automaker, declined to comment on the Chongqing plant's production or the showroom's sales but said it is "closely cooperating" with local partner BAIC to turn around the China business. BAIC did not respond to requests for comment. Hyundai's woes mark a major reversal for the automaker which was an early success story in China as it quickly and cheaply rolled out popular new models into a surging market. In 2009, Hyundai and partner Kia's combined sales ranked third in China after General Motors and Volkswagen. The South Korean duo now ranks ninth, and its market share in China was 4 percent last year, from more than10 percent at the beginning of this decade. Executives and industry experts say Hyundai conceded its once stronghold in the low-end segment to fast-growing Chinese rivals such as Geely and BYD. Foreign rivals not only defended their turf in premium segments but also kept pricing competitive for mass-market models, squeezing Hyundai's positioning as an affordable foreign brand, they said. In the United States, the world's second-biggest auto market, Hyundai's market share fell to 4 percent last year, near a decade low. Hyundai ran into problems in China and the United States for similar reasons: It missed shifts in consumer tastes, especially the surge in demand for SUVs, and it sought higher prices than its brand image could command, four Chinese dealers and half a dozen former and current U.S.