Lambo Blogging: Inside Hyundai’s New Design Studio

Hyundai Motor Co. has opened a hulking new design studio for its Hyundai and Genesis brands that will allow the automaker to work on 24 separate vehicles at the same time.

The $67 million studio spans 330,000 square feet—double the size of the old studio—and will house 400 Hyundai and Genesis designers.

In this massive building, the Hyundai and Genesis design teams will get their own separate spaces.

“We want Hyundai and Genesis design to be like Toyota and Lexus, separated by walls and with separate communications,” said Sangyop Lee, Genesis’ executive director for design.

Why isn’t Kia here, too? Because it has its own studio 2 miles away within Hyundai Motor’s sprawling Nam Yang R&D complex.

It might astonish some that Hyundai Motor is a 50-year-old car brand, but it is. That said, it made its bones for decades by building uninspired commodity cars and therefore lacks any sort of heritage or legacy in design.

“Forty years ago, Hyundai’s design department was three guys who didn’t know anything about cars,” said Luc Donckerwolke, design director for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. “So Hyundai worked with ItalDesign and Mitsubishi.” As a result of this lack of institutional memory, the new studio will have a massive design library.

But the main goal of the new studio will be to accelerate the product-development process. Currently, the timeline for most Hyundai vehicles is five years from the start of product planning to Job 1, or three years from a designer’s pencil hitting paper to Job 1. Hyundai wants to see that timeline cut in half, Lee said.

Hyundai also is hiring 30 or 40 new hires in the digital design space to help achieve that goal.

“About 20 percent of all cars with good proportions had those changes made after the prototypes had been built, and that carries an enormous cost,” Donckerwolke said. “With this digital team, the engineers will already have the data. That solves many of the problems that can come later.”

In keeping with the German background of several recent executive-level additions to the Hyundai management team, Hyundai hired Munich-based Henn as architects for the structure. For those who keep track of such stuff, Henn also was the architect group for the Porsche Design Studio in Weissach, Germany, as well as the Porsche Pavilion in Wolfsburg.

The walls are mostly drywall, with a scattering of Alfrex composite panels. Four full-size surface plates dominate one massive hall, while there are 26 milling stations for clay models.

Once the models are complete, there are 13 display turntables—five outdoor and eight indoor with variable light levels. Lee said the indoor space has the longest LED panel in the world built into the ceiling.

Donckerwolke was the key touch point in talking with Henn. His main critique of the old studio: “It didn’t have space or distance. You couldn’t show the stance or proportion of a car. And you couldn’t have a comparison car parked next to it.”