Hyundai’s 2024 CEO Investor Day delivered a mic drop: The N Vision 74 performance car will enter production by 2030. Boom. The car the internet wants is going into production, and if you spoke up about wishing to see it in showrooms, give yourself a pat on the back. I’m not saying you exclusively made this happen, but your cheer likely helped. However, once Hyundai builds the N Vision 74, it’ll face its most difficult challenge yet — will Hyundai dealers be able to sell a supercar?
Let’s say that the N Vision 74 goes into production using the same hydrogen hybrid powertrain as the concept. It’ll be complex and expensive, offer a truly unique performance experience, and attract a customer that otherwise might never set foot in a Hyundai showroom. The sort of people who’ve previously been compelled by fast Corvettes, Porsche 911s, and even Audi R8s.
In theory, the N Vision 74 should be the sort of car that sells itself on desire alone. It’s just such a want-one shape, that you’d think selling units means a dealer just needs to honor MSRP, present a contract, and job done, right? If you’re already chuckling, you know what I’m on about. See, Hyundai’s American dealer network doesn’t have the greatest reputation on the face of the planet, and Hyundai will be trusting it to do a pretty important job.
Let’s start with markups. Earlier this year, Autoblog reported on a $20,000 markup placed on a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N being sold at a franchise dealer in California, and it’s not the only case. A quick surf online has found one Hyundai dealer in Ohio with an Ioniq 5 N marked up $14,995 over MSRP, another Hyundai dealership in California has an Ioniq 5 N marked up $15,000 over MSRP, and another Hyundai dealer in Arizona has an Ioniq 5 N marked up $5,649 over MSRP, and the list goes on. If a broad selection of dealerships can’t be trusted to sell a more affordable, more mass-market car at MSRP, would you trust them to honor MSRP on a high-end car like the N Vision 74?
Alright, let’s assume people are okay with paying markups to get the hottest new Hyundai. Suspension of disbelief, but fine. The pummelling continues on the back end, with Hyundai’s dealer service experience ranked 16th out of 18 mainstream brands in JD Power’s 2024 dealership customer service index survey, with just Volkswagen and Ram preventing them from coming in dead last. That’s not a great place to be, especially when trying to court high-end clients. Remember, Lexus built a great deal of its reputation on outstanding customer service, and continues to reap the benefits.
Dealerships often give the first impression of a manufacturer, even if they’re just middlemen. Some dealers do a fantastic job of making that first impression, but others have a long way to go. As it stands, Hyundai’s American dealer network has a long way to go before it seems ready to sell what can be considered a supercar. Let’s hope progress is made by the time the N Vision 74 launches, because even if the shape of the car might sell itself, some dealers might do their best to dissuade potential customers.
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal, Hyundai)
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I’m very doubtful that this will be a “supercar” by the time it makes it to production. My assumption is that it will be in the Supra/Z class and be a plug-in hybrid. And no, Hyundai dealers will not be able to sell them.
Crossing my fingers that they mostly crib the powertrain from the Ioniq 5 N, and lower the weight by 25%. This has the potential to be the LFA or GTR for Hyundai, for better and worse.
LFA route – $150,000, carbon fiber body, amazing driving dynamics if maybe a bit underpowered or under-ranged compared to competition, critic darling that doesn’t sell. They take a loss on every vehicle but then again so do most halo cars.
GTR route – $98,000, aluminum body, takes what they learned from the Ioniq 5 N and pump up the power and range, using more techno-wizardry to make it the fastest car under $100,000. Considered a performance bargain that is very successful at launch, they ride that platform as long as they can while increasing the price each mild refresh.
I absolutely love the design of this car; it’s such a breath of fresh air compared to most new cars. That said, I’m worried this will be the CRZ again. I think they should ditch the weird drivetrain and just make a basic I4 Turbo model, and then do a hybrid version with a boosted tiny 3 cylinder with a hybrid system that is only meant to boost performance, not MPG. But they need a basic ICE version.
If they are even considering hydrogen for the production model then it’s DOA
This looks cool but hyundai and kia have a loooooong way to go before i ever think they could make a decent car.
*cough* Elantra hybrid blue under 30,000$ with 50+ mpg 4 doors, and modern goodies *cough*
I’m far from a Hyundai/Kia fan. But they are making decent cars right now. Stinger, Telluride, Pallisade, and the Genesis line are all decent.
Sorry about the coma you fell into during the early 2000s.
I owned a Veloster N, not only was it decent it was spectacular. Sold it because I was young and stupid and couldn’t afford the payments.
God I hope they don’t try to make it a supercar. Just make it a fun coup like a Miata. Make it electric, even. Forget the hydrogen and forget trying to break records. Make a fun car that most people can buy.
Heck even after removing the front splitter, rear splitter, side skirts, spoiler, etc. it would still look awesome as a base or other lower trim models!
My thoughts exactly. This doesn’t need to be strictly a high performance, unobtainium machine. Give it a halo spec like the concept, sure – but a decent performing and priced car with just that basic silhouette would be something a lot more people would be able to appreciate.
It doesn’t really matter what sort of performance it has, it’ll be unobtainium simply because the dealers will charge 50k over MSRP.
The cover car for the best FH5 Update of all time? (great updates, let alone good updates, like that one, are rare in FH5) SIGN ME UP!
Hyundai is really bad about dating its own styling. The brand is quick to jump from one school of design to the next, often with older products suspended uncomfortably across two separate design schemes.
I think that’s one reason Hyundai’s resale value is low (long-term reliability is another). The brand scarcely does evolutionary styling, which means the old product looks really old compared to the new.
Right now, Hyundai is on a geometric, 80s-retro kick, which I do think looks cool. But if it is planning release the N74 by 2030, will the N74 look stupid amid the rest of the Hyundai lineup by then…which will have moved on?
I think the appeal is in its look, regardless of the rest of the lineup. The Sonata doesn’t have to look like a sedan version of this for it to be cool on its own.
I know lots in here are saying there is no way in chances hell this will be near the same as the concept and not be a hydrogen hybrid but I think there is a chance it is depending how the Market they are going for. If this a full fledge production vehicle they want selling mustang, Corvette or other similar sport type car numbers no way in hell it will be like the concept. Now if this is some low ass production vehicle like the NSX or the Ford GT where they are only build like 1000 or less a year and it cost 300k+ so it is only for a small rich minority of people out there then I can see it being pretty damn near the concept.
Let’s be real. The production car will bear a resemblance to the concept, but it will not be the concept. There’s not a snowballs chance in hell that this will have a hydrogen anything. The wing, diffuser and the scoops are either gone or extremely toned down. The wheels are iffy.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a great shape and I’m sure it’ll be great when it’s on sale. Nobody wants hydrogen, so good riddance to that.
I see this going on sale as a smoothed out, toned done dual motor EV with 600-700HP.
That’s exactly what I’m hoping for. With the added wish that they keep the retrofuture interior. I’ll be very disappointed if the production car is door-to-door touchscreens.
I hope they make normal versions without all the body kit stuff, but I also hope they make high-performance versions with very similar (if not the same) kits. Maybe keeping the concept “N” almost if not the same bodywise.
I would be happy if it was pure concept car retrofuture, but I think the best approach is still the retrofuture look, but with a console touchscreen where the vents currently are (or close to it) and keep the overall design and shape the same or very similer (Maybe add a glove box somewhere).
It’s gonna be HUGE capital district!
HUUUUUUGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEE-JAH.
/flashbacks intensify
Is that a Billy Fuccillo reference?
You can bet your Huge-A-Thon it is.
We used to have non-stop commercials for the “Fuccillo 500” at his Hyundai store out in the middle of nowhere.
He was the dominant car dealer personality in Upstate NY for a solid 15-20 years. Somehow he managed to do the stereotypical coked-up c-c-c-crazy car dealer schtick in a way that was simultaneously annoying, effective and endearing. He’s beloved by seemingly everyone around here.
Dude sold an absolute buttload of Hyundai. But I laugh at the idea of supercar buyers walking into one of his dealers to “BE HUGE”.
Hyundai could put the powertrain from that DAF33 in it and I’d still pinch pennys to buy one. It’s hitting all the right notes for me from my armchair in 2024. *the 2030 me reserves the right to not like it anymore since it may look dated by that point*
Wow, 2030? Who knows if we’ll still be riding in cars by then. If the N74 concept was a hat tip to the Giugiaro-designed Pony concept from ’74, then I’ll guess they’ll need a new design for 2030? Will this be the N22? A Giugiaro-penned homage to the 2022 N74 concept?
Get a Stinger and drop that body on it.
No one loves this concept for the tech, it’s all about the styling.
Yes, and 5 years is too long to wait – the hype will be all the way gone, and as others have said, the deep likelihood is that the rest of Hyundai/Kia will have moved on from the current 8-bit retro 80’s styling by then.
5 years is a long product cycle. That’s “oh, we’re going to start doing advanced R&D, and in a couple years start working on the actual production car project” timescales. Which implies to me that they’re putting something 100% new (new platform, new powertrain, some very important subsystem) into this thing.
If they do as you wisely propose and repurpose an existing architecture (assuming doing so doesn’t warp the shape of the concept so far that it isn’t attractive anymore, since things like the firewall shape and location, A/B/C pillar, sometimes track width and wheelbase etc. are fixed) they should be able to get to market in 3 years from the drop of the flag. That *might* be in time…
The car itself looks like the love child of a late-80’s Supra and a DeLorean.
Good luck finding replacement whitewall tires with four quarter-circle highlight sections.
Probably just decals.
It’s funny to pretend like that the custom tires won’t be among the first things dropped when it goes from concept to production.
I don’t know, the Cybertruck has bespoke tires. It’s possible if you care enough.
The CyberTruck is a uniquely incompetent design, they didn’t even bother testing enough to find that glaring flaw with the caps over the rims. Hyundai is much more sensible than Tesla.
The production version will end up as regular whitewalls along with a bespoke Hyundai Sharpie.
Hyundai haven’t confirmed the powertrain, just that the car will enter production. Given the current state of hydrogen infrastructure it doesn’t seem like the best choice.
Yeah, that’s the actual biggest hurdle if it enters production with a hydrogen powertrain. Lotta prospective buyers outside of California.
Hyundai would be better off with powertrain that uses hamsters motivated by carrots on exercise wheels.
At least I know where to buy hamsters.
Are they not selling this as a mass produced semi-affordable car because not enough people buy coupes?
The only way I can see this not being a fuckup is if the cars are allocated via contract. Of course that means only the big markets get will get them (New York City, Miami, Columbus, Chicago, Houston, Portland, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego), but hopefully the dealerships in those big markets are themselves big enough to get their heads rattled by corporate if they try and mess with the sales of a halo car too much. Unlike Kia who’s had a few dirt trap deities in the past few years (K5 GT Line AWD, Stinger GT, Rio GT Line) Hyundai’s had jack shit outside of the Veloster N — and even enthusiasts barely seem to be aware of the Veloster N.
How is Portland a bigger market than Seattle?
The hydrogen fuel cell system is an immediate non-starter. It will be prohibitively expensive to implement and there will be nowhere to obtain fuel.
Making it a plug-in series hybrid with a massive power-dense battery pack and a smallish ICE acting as a range extender(and sized appropriately for track duty) is going to be the likely course of design to make this car happen.
I think 2030 is a way they can hedge their bets on the powertrain a bit. H2 is being looked at quite seriously for long haul trucking and other markets where EVs present serious challgenges, but it seems like a longshot that it’s open to the passenger car market. Barring some massive shift in infrastructure this thing seems destined to be an EV. By 2030 I’d imagine C-rates will have improved to the point where this can be made stupid-fast with a relatively small and lightweight battery pack (it’s a supercar, who cares if the range is 200 miles).
I think its less long shot and more smoke and mirrors in a hyper loop kind of way.
Auto dealers have always been the largest problem auto manufacturers have faced.
2030? Seriously? Come on, man.
I agree. Let me hit the snooze bar and wake me when something happens.
They’re 100% going to pull an LFA but bomb it even more. Hyundai dealers just aren’t good enough to represent and sell anything like this.
This is awesome, and I hope other makes follow with some halo EVs that look the business.
Hyundai dealers will for sure do crazy markups, but is that any different than Dodge dealers when the Hellcats came out? Only general make I think of recently that actively discouraged that sort of thing was Ford.
I’m curious if they ditch the hydrogen or just advance the tech they put in the Ioniq 5 N, I’m thinking the latter, maybe adding some supercapacitors to provide the boost the fuel cells were going to.
I’m very excited about this car, and who knows…maybe I’ll be in the financial situation to consider one depending on how much it costs and where we’re at financially in a 6 years. That being said-Hyundai dealerships can and will fuck it up.
I love my Hyundai, but their dealerships have absolutely earned their miserable reputation. Shopping for an N of any variety in 2022 was an absolute nightmare. I think the underlying issue is that Hyundai and Kia dealerships are used to selling cheap, undesirable cars that people buy either as a last resort and/or because it’s the only thing they can afford.
They’ve spent decades treating customers like dirt because they knew they could without any consequences…and naturally they attracted the slimiest salespeople as a result. The problem that will inevitably happen with this is actually already happening-they have no idea what to do now that they have cars that people actually want.
It’s one of the reasons the Stinger failed. They made a compelling product that attracted more discerning buyers…who then walked away when Kyle from sales breathed his cig breath all over them for 2 hours while finding a way to charge them $10,000 for the tru coat and weathertech floor mats.
On top of that, how the fuck would their service departments handle something this complex?!?! The dolts at the dealership I get my car serviced at can’t even remember to do a tire rotation half the time and talk to me like I’m an idiot when I know more about my car than most of them do. Every time I’m there I see someone lose it and scream at them. One time while I was waiting for my car to be serviced there a couple literally came into the waiting room and started making out. In front of like 10 people and actual children.
The average 911 buyer isn’t going to stand for that. Hell, it’s probably worse than what the average Mustang buyer is willing to put up with. Hyundai dealerships suck mondo ass and corporate doesn’t give a flying fuck about it.
My Hyundai dealer is 3 months out for “diagnostic” work, half of the lube techs can’t drive manual, and has about 4 fully trained techs with space for 8. And when it comes to sales I’ve helped a couple non car friends buy cars at other Hyundai dealers and they’re always extremely pushy and shady. Hyundai has zero business selling a car like this with their current dealer network.
Bingo. When VW brought out the Tourag my friend who likes cars and can afford anything he likes figured it was Porsche in VW badging and thought he’d give one a try. Well… the first generation were loaded with problems (like needing to replace the whole dash) and he had to take it to the dealer a lot in the year he kept it. He came to hate the dealership. Zero customer service. Cheap chairs and bitter coffee. Waiting in line at a counter to turn it in. He had to fight for a loaner every time, and then they kept trying to put him in a Beetle. Uh, no. Further, they had no one who could work on the car so it had to wait for “The Traveling Technician” to come to town so service took forever.
The car itself was okay (except for all the warranty work needed) but the dealer simply didn’t understand how to treat luxury car customers.
I can’t imagine Hyundai will do any better.
The Stinger was the first thing I thought of. There’s no way this is going to go well unless there’s drastic changes at the dealerships before the car launches. They’re just going to kill all the hype by being shitty.
It’s also why I think Genesis has suffered, speaking from my experience as a (former) Genesis customer. Rather than launching the brand properly and formally, Hyundai chose to do a soft launch and sell the cars at Hyundai stores. (The fact that it was a last-minute decision to even do the Genesis brand, in the first place, is another story; the early ones, including my 2018 G90 5.0, clearly had senior-Hyundai styling and would’ve continued being Hyundais). Even now that they are doing standalone stores, its with the same sleazy, arrogant, poorly trained staff that were working at the Hyundai store…with the result being that Genesis customers have to put up with the sort of chicanery that would be offensive at even half the price.
You hit the nail on the head. They have a great warranty but they’ll do everything they can not to honor it. I speak from experience. In March I bought a ’24 Sonata N Line. One month later the battery went completely dead, not even the interior lights would come on. I jumped it off and got it to the dealer. They said the car was ready to be picked up the next day. They said they didn’t do anything to it because it started for them and their diagnostics showed A-OK. I signed the work order and it said, “Could not verify customer complaint.” I questioned that maybe the battery had a bad cell and should be replaced as a matter of course. Nope, everything is fine, go home. As I was leaving their last words were, “We can’t fix it if there’s nothing wrong.” When I got home I could see the clamp marks on the battery where they charged it.
To be fair, I’ve owned a few Hyundais and I liked them. This was my first warranty experience, and I’m done. Pardon my venting.
I had a similar experience with the starter on my 2018 Hyundai Elantra GT. I needed multiple jumps and at least two trips to the dealership before anything got sorted out. I told them from the get-go that the starter was failing it based on the sound and symptoms, but it was handled in an almost identical way to your experience.
Sorry. It’s a shame.
It’s all good. This happened back in 2019 or so. I miss the little blue tin can, but I’m pretty happy with my Maverick. But between all the recalls and Ford’s crappily short warranty, I’m very strongly considering an ESP. Depending on how things shake out, I might pitch it as an article.
It seems obvious to me that this should be sold and serviced as a Genesis model, both for the dealer experience and because logically expensive cars go with luxury brands.
Selling a 6-figure Hyundai reeks of Phaeton 2.0, regardless of how cool the vehicle itself is.
Genesis doesn’t really have standalone dealerships yet. They’re out there, but in a lot of areas (like where I’m at) they’re sold through Hyundai dealerships, which must be a massive turn off for potential customers.
By 2030 I’d hope they would have a lot more, but point taken.
I tried buying a Genesis G80 in 2020. Their customer service was so bad it drove me to a Dodge dealer, who was excellent in comparison.
The Genesis I was interested in, when I showed up for my appointment, wasn’t ready. Not that I knew because the salesperson I had the appointment with tell me, they ignored me in the customer lounge for half an hour. I finally went to walk the lot and found the car I’d asked about in the lineup still, dirty with road dust and a flat tire. Needless to say, I haven’t been back.
At this point, there are plenty of standalone Genesis dealers, and more coming online.
Unfortunately, they’re still staffed with former Hyundai people, and all the toxic culture that brings. I bought a 2018 G90 5.0 AWD from a standalone Genesis dealer in Illinois (Genesis of North Aurora) and it was the worst purchasing experience of my life. It took them over 100 days to get me the title, even though I paid cash, and they lied and told me I had to file TT&L paperwork with them, despite paying cash and living in a whole other state. They refused to provide a second key or an under-hood fusebox cover after promising both in writing on the we-owe, and then dragged their feet on getting me the replacements after I held them to the fire over it. Finally, when I got sick of Genesis as a whole and decided to sell it, I had a helluva time getting the extended service contract canceled.
So how hard will it be to swap out the hydrogen part and put in something there is actually fuel available for?
Asking the right questions here
I wouldn’t be surprised if they made both a hydrogen version for CA and a PHEV version for everywhere else. However, by 2030, maybe some progress will be made on the hydrogen corridors for shipping, and it’s more widely available.
https://www.abc12.com/news/biden-administration-invests-7-billion-in-clean-hydrogen-hubs/article_1ca0518c-6a15-11ee-84ad-9f663720d2f3.html
Don’t count on it. Any renewable hydrogen needs to saturate the needs of industry before even considered for transport. Worse that hydrogen must be made using surplus renewable energy that would otherwise go to waste, otherwise you’re just shuffling smokestacks.
Its going to be a looong time before we have enough surplus renewable energy to make hydrogen for transport at any useful quantity.