Over the last decade, Hyundai has emerged as a design leader in the automotive industry, and its luxury arm, Genesis, is upending the traditional hierarchy with distinctive, beautiful cars. Much of that credit goes to SangYup Lee, who joined Hyundai as design chief in 2016. He’s one of the most talented people in the automotive world today, and one of the nicest.
Born and raised in South Korea, Lee’s path was unconventional. He studied sculpture in college, but didn’t want to go through the inevitable starving-artist period that follows. A trip to visit the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, showed him how to apply his skills to a career with more stability.
"I visited there and saw a car design major student and they were actually making a clay model of a car," Lee recalls. "I was looking at it, and I thought ‘Oh! I’m good at making clay models as well, so maybe there’s something I can do and I can have so much fun out of it.'"
Lee decided to leave home for California to study car design at the Art Center. The toughest adjustment was coming from a place with virtually no car culture to the world’s mecca for automotive enthusiasm. Korea had been making cars for decades by that point, but there wasn’t really a car-enthusiast culture, Lee explains, just a business culture.
"My classmates, they all grew up with cars… so they are all car enthusiasts and I was not," he says. "So it was quite a challenge for me to adapt to the culture and learn. But at the same time, one benefit of not knowing anything about cars, it’s like a little kid learning a language, like a sponge soaking up water. I adapted without filtering."
After graduating, Lee moved to Europe to intern at both Pininfarina, where he was mentored by Ken Okuyama, and Porsche, where he worked under Stefan Stark. In Italy, he also got to know Giorgetto Giugiaro, perhaps one of the most influential car designers of all time.
From Europe, Lee moved back to the US to join GM, where he worked on the Cadillac Sixteen concept, C6 Corvette, and fifth-generation Camaro, among many other projects. Then it was off to Europe again, to the Volkswagen Group. There, he worked on the VW brand, then headed up exterior design for Bentley, designing the EXP 10 Speed 6 concept and the current Continental GT.
Before moving back to Korea to join Hyundai and Genesis, Lee lived in eight different countries and designed for 15 different car brands. It was an ideal education for his current position, overseeing design for two different brands—three, if you count Hyundai’s commercial division separately—selling cars across the globe.
"I don’t consider myself a Korean designer, to be honest," he says. "To become a good designer, you really have to have a global perspective, so I think my journey has been understanding a global perspective. Now, working for a Korean company, I didn’t join Hyundai and Genesis because I’m Korean, I joined because of the vision and passion and the history is unbelievable."
Lee credits Hyundai leadership for challenging the design team to continually push forward. You can see the results in the striking cars Hyundai and Genesis sell today. Hyundai also doesn’t see design and engineering as two warring factions pushing their agendas on one another, as is so often the case in car design.
"Designers have to dream, and engineers have to make that dream come true. This is our mentality," he says.
Lee also is quick to point out that Hyundai is laser-focused on its customers, which he concedes is an obvious thing for someone in his position to say, but it’s not just talk. He and his team spend a lot of time thinking about what the customer needs, even the things they might not know they need.
"A car is expensive, you know," he says, "when you pay this much money, it has to be worth it."
When Lee visits the US (Hyundai has a design and engineering center in Irvine, California), he makes sure to visit Costco. Not for bulk paper towels or cheap vodka, but to observe his customers in the parking lot, like a sort of car-design David Attenborough. There, he can see how customers use their cars, and determine how he can make them better.
It also stresses the need to make his work stand out. "There are so many cars in the parking lot, and often I ask myself, ‘What the heck am I supposed to do to make my car special?'"
At Hyundai and Genesis, designs start from a clean sheet of paper, but not out of a vacuum. "Before I start, I just want to make sure I always look back to bring what I have to do to the next level." That means looking back at past Hyundai models, but also at entire eras of car design, and the learnings from each.
'Designers have to dream, and engineers have to make that dream come true. This is our mentality.'
You can see that thinking in the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6. The former, being an everyday family car, takes inspiration from the Giugiaro-designed hatchbacks of the 1970s. The Volkswagen Golf, Lancia Delta, and the first Hyundai Pony were slab-sided with simple pressings as they were easier to manufacture cheaply but at high quality. The Ioniq 6 meanwhile, references early, low-drag cars like the first Saabs, which were designed by aero engineers. Hyundai wanted this electric sedan to be as efficient as possible, and a modern streamliner design pays homage to those early innovators.
The Hyundai brand is also careful to make meaningful differences between its models. Lee cites the new Santa Fe and Ioniq 9 as examples. Both three-row SUVs, but the Santa Fe went boxy both to reflect the trend toward this style and to maximize interior volume. On the other hand, the Ioniq 9 looks totally different.
“Should we do two boxy SUVs? Probably not,” Lee muses.
Thus, the Ioniq 9 has a more rounded design to maximize aero efficiency, which is more important in an EV than the gas-powered Santa Fe.
"In car design, form has to follow function."
Not that Lee isn’t having fun. He always tries to inject a bit of optimism and joy into his designs.
"You know, the world is becoming more and more uncertain," he says, "the anxiety of people is growing and growing. Can we have a product to make people smile?"
Lee is also very philosophical about car design and Hyundai’s place within the pantheon of great design. He consciously avoids the sort of same-sausage-different-length design offerings of German automakers, instead differentiating each car from another, each making its own statement.
"We don’t have the brand power like Mercedes has. Yet," he says. "So we’re taking risks… because our customer profile is so different."
Hyundai’s base is diverse. As such, different sorts of designs appeal to different groups of customers.
'In car design, form has to follow function.'
Lee keeps returning back to this need to be “humble,” because Hyundai is still something of a challenger to the establishment—even if it is over 50 years old—and car design is about continuous evolution. The nature of designing cars has also changed significantly, and continues to do so. It’s a discipline designers must approach with humility.
“Back in the day of Giorgetto Giugario and Bertone, they’re the maestros, everybody else bows to them,” Lee says. “These days, it doesn’t work that way. It’s very complicated, not only on the hardware side, but the software side. He stresses the importance of keeping an open mind to his team. You have to collaborate with everyone else to create a car, not just impose your vision on them.
Beyond everything, Lee is grateful.
"My journey has been very fortunate. I’ve been able to meet great people, a lot of people. And one thing I always like is new challenges, new opportunities, new people. Now, I have to start thinking about how to pass my legacy to younger designers, just like how my mentors made me who I am right now."
