2014 Hyundai Veloster Turbo on 2040-cars

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We visit Hyundai's Nurburgring test center

Understanding the achievement and the message of Hyundai Motor Group having a European Technical Center at the Nurburgring might be easier if we look at what Hyundai has done in the US. In 1985 Hyundai Motor America set up shop in California. The first car sold here was the 1986 Excel, a rebodied Mitsubishi Mirage with a Hyundai interior treatment. This was the first Mirage, which also served as the Chrysler Colt in hatchback form and circled back as the Mitsubishi Precis so Mitsu could get around Japanese automakers' voluntary export quotas of the time. The Excel made such an impression on reviewers and buyers that in Car and Driver's 1986 review they wrote that "'astounding' is not too strong word" to describe the company's progress, and said, "Our guess is that Hyundai will be a major force in the US car market almost from the moment it opens its doors." Hyundai sold 168,882 Excels in the US in its first year, back when the Ford F-Series led all comers with 544,969 sales. That's what happened. The company sold 168,882 Excels in the US in its first year, back when the Ford F-Series led all comers with 544,969 sales, the Chevrolet Celebrity came second of all vehicles with 408,946 sales, the Honda Accord seventh with 325,004 sales. The Excel sold even better the following year, and the year after that. Three years on, buyers began to discover that one of the things the Excel did best was disintegrate. It's been called "fantastically crappy," Popular Mechanics would later say the Excel "deserved to fail," and they decomposed so thoroughly that you'll have a hard time finding one in any junkyard. Buyers got so allergic to the Flying H badge that sales declined for ten consecutive years. By 1999, when Hyundai's model range was four times larger than it had been in 1986 – Accent, Elantra, Sonata, Tiburon – the brand sold just 90,217 cars in the US. Two important things happened around that nadir. In 1998, as a way of reassuring potential customers, Hyundai became the first automaker to introduce a 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty. In 1999, Mong-Koo Chung became the CEO of Hyundai Motor Company, promoted from 11 years as CEO of Hyundai Motor Service, a role that put him in charge of global warranty claims. Having spent all those years of his life wading through that carnage, he swore when he took the top spot that he'd get the situation fixed. In 2014 the JD Power Initial Quality Survey ranked Hyundai the leading non-premium brand.

Hyundai i20 WRC gets shakedown in Finland

It's always a good day when we get to post a video about rally racing. It's even better when that video is of a new WRC competitor undergoing testing. This spy video shows Hyundai's i20 WRC, a car that debuted nearly one year ago at the 2012 Paris Motor Show. It's set to usher in Hyundai's return to top-flight motorsports, and will do battle with the cars from Citroen, Ford and Volkswagen that are currently contesting the 2013 season.
This video, which shows the i20 testing on the notoriously tough Finnish rally stages, gives the impression that progress on the new WRC contender is going well. It certainly looks fast, and as with the vast majority of rally cars, it sounds absolutely wonderful (listen to some of those gun-shot-like backfires). Take a look below for the whole, glorious three minutes and 20 seconds of unadulterated rally noise, flying dirt and jumping.

Hyundai, Kia and U of M studying 'highway hypnosis'

Next up on the hot-button list of things that can kill you behind the wheel: "highway hypnosis." That's the zombie-like, autopilot phase you get into on a long highway drive when there isn't much to distract you, like curves or traffic. Digging further into what it is and how to combat it, Hyundai-Kia engineers and the University of Michigan are commencing a study that will measure brainwave activity in order to track the body's slide into highway hypnosis.
We're not sure how much overlap this has with Mercedes-Benz's Attention Assist, which tracks more than 70 in-car parameters to determine when you're not focused on the road anymore. That system is billed as an alarm against fatigue, in our experience it does more than that - if you use your phone while driving, for instance, it will chirp.
They don't know what form a warning system will take yet, but Hyundai-Kia plans to develop a method for warning drivers when they being to zone out. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were more than three thousand deaths and nearly 400,000 injuries due to distracted driving in 2011.