Ever since Hyundai announced it was forming the ‘N’ division, there have been rumours of an exclusive range-topper. We read on TopGear that Hyundai is planning to launch a bespoke, ground-up performance car.
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After we seen and drive its production models, like the i30 N, the Veloster N or the soon to come i30 N Fastback, looks like Hyundai’s N performance brand is ready & set to develop its own standalone vehicle according to what company’s boss of high-performance vehicle planning Gyoo Heon Choi said in an interview with Top Gear
Hyundai has confirmed it is indeed doing a ‘halo model’ for its N-performance sub-brand. Speaking with Autocar, they said it will ride on a bespoke platform, which is excellent (though there will be some “sharing”), but the company’s remaining tight-lipped about everything else.
Gyoo Heon Choi, the company’s boss of high-performance vehicle planning, says Hyundai “needs something to further improve [its] high performance image”. “The base model [i30N] is not enough. Volume-wise it’s good, but it’s just a derivative [of the normal i30]. We need something unique and powerful to live at the top of the hierarchy,” he says. “At the top is motorsports, then just behind that is halo and then comes the N models.”
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“We’re developing more powerful combustion engines for future cars,” Choi went on, “but also more powerful electric powertrains; experimental performance fuel cells, too. Conventional four-wheel drive is an option for the [halo] car, but it is very old technology. I would prefer to think about a front-engined hybridised platform with a rear-mounted electric motor; it’s an appealing direction for us.”
Is it not clear what type of car or when could arrive this halo model, but it is pretty sure that we need to wait a few years to see it.
Klaus Köster, director of high performance vehicles at Hyundai’s European Technical Centre, added more detail about the halo car, saying: “Our challenge is to make the product affordable but also credible in the way we define any Hyundai N car. It cannot only be capable of just a handful of laps of a track before losing power – but also cannot be pitched at a price of hundreds of thousands of euros. The people who buy those kinds of cars are not Hyundai customers; not yet, at any rate.”
