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Hyundai’s First Car, the Pony, Turns 50
If your neighbor mentioned in passing that he was shopping for a new car and considering a Hyundai, it’s unlikely that you’d be startled or surprised. While there’s still plenty of conversation to be had about whether a Honda or Toyota might have a little more brand cachet, based mostly on past reputation, Hyundai is by now a well-established manufacturer of all kinds of passenger cars. Perhaps you yourself daily a Santa Fe while a beloved MG awaits the arrival of spring, tucked away in the garage, or maybe your neice leased an Elantra as dependable transportation upon getting her first job out of college. While the N-branded vehicles stand out as notable exceptions, there is nothing particularly remarkable about your average Hyundai, and that should be taken as the highest compliment. Buying a Hyundai today is not risky. But fifty years ago, the company made a hell of a gamble.
2025 marks a milestone anniversary for the South Korean automotive industry, as it is the 50th anniversary of the Hyundai Pony. Canadians in the audience may have already started to snicker, as the second-generation Pony was sold there beginning in 1983, and it proved itself something of a laughingstock. We’ll get to that a little later.

However, in the Republic of Korea, the original Pony is venerated, to the point that you’ll find digitized versions showing up in multiplayer avatar-based online social games. At Hyundai’s showrooms in Seoul, you can buy a Pony t-shirt or a detailed diecast model of a Pony. There’s a surprising amount of pride around this simple little car, and for good reason: it was the first proper Korean car.
Of course, poke around a Pony’s engine and suspension, and you start to see that there was as much imitation going on as there was innovation. Nevertheless, it was a breakthrough, and quickly became the people’s car of Korea. As an export model, it is the grandfather of every Tucson or Santa Fe, and the economy car at the root of the Genesis luxury sub-brand. Certainly, then, this is a birthday worth celebrating, especially because the path to the Pony wasn’t easy.
Chung Ju-yung and the 1001 cows
Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-yung, is perhaps the most inspirational automotive figure you’ve never heard of. He was born in 1915 into abject poverty in what would become North Korea, and was at the time an occupied country, part of the Japanese empire. The eldest of seven children, he worked on the family farm from a very early age.
Ju-yung grated under the oppressive yoke of a life of subsistence farming. There was little time for education, and seemingly few other ways out. On occasional trips to a nearby town, he couldn’t help but contrast his stultifying rural life with the bustle of people. So he ran away. A lot.
Beginning when he was sixteen, Ju-yung fled the family farm at least four times, the first three resulting in being soon found and forced back home by his father. However, during these escapes, he managed to find basic construction work, and also picked up some classes in bookkeeping. For one of the escapes, he sold a cow belonging to his father for money to buy a train ticket.


The fourth escape attempt, made at the age of eighteen, secured his path to a new life. After working as a laborer, he got a job at a small rice store, where he was such a diligent worker that the store’s owner gave him more and more responsibility. When the owner fell ill in 1937, he transferred ownership of the store to Ju-yung, who ran it successfully for two years before the Japanese occupying forces imposed rice rationing.
Here’s where the first germination of Hyundai as an automotive company begins. Looking around to see what opportunities were actually afforded to Koreans under Japanese rule, Ju-yung hit on automobile repair. He opened the A-do service garage, growing the company rapidly and more than tripling its workforce. Wartime restrictions put him out of business once more, but he had managed to set aside enough money for seed capital once WWII ended.

Two years after the end of WWII, Ju-yung founded the Hyundai Engineering and Construction Company. He landed several government contracts for building highways and other infrastructure, and managed to survive the Korean war. He founded the Hyundai Motor Corporation in 1967, and would go on to become the richest man in South Korea.
Ju-yung’s life is noted for both immense philanthropic efforts, and his work to ease tensions between the North and South Koreas. Along with setting up foundations that built hospitals and ran scholarships, he helped behind-the-scenes to get loans to North Korea in the late 1990s. In 1998, he became the first civilian to officially cross the demilitarized into North Korea, making two trips in which he brought 1001 indigenous Korean cattle (a breed called Hanwoo), repaying that long-ago debt to his father a thousand times over.

The Ford Cortina and the Miracle on the Han River
At the time of founding of Hyundai as an automotive company, its parent brand was already established as a chaebol, or a large company managed by a family dynasty. These are very similar to the Japanese system of zaibatsu, or you can of course think of the fictional family at the heart of HBO’s Succession.
By the early 1960s, Korea already had a nascent automotive industry, including the then fully independent Kia. Today Kia has a close partnership with Hyundai, but in those days it was building licensed small cars and trucks in partnership with Mazda, and even a line of licensed Honda motorcycles.
At that point, South Korea’s economy was outperforming that of North Korea, but only barely. Politicians pointed to the rapid rise of West Germany—the Wirtschaftswunder—as a trend to be emulated. A military coup led to the dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee, who would run the country until his assassination in 1979. Under his authority, a series of five-year plans aimed to grow the economy were implemented.

Hyundai’s expertise in construction was key to its entry into the automotive sphere. After discussions with Ford, an agreement was made to assemble complete knockdown kits (CKD) of the Ford Cortina. This would be the start of a long partnership between Hyundai and Ford, the former building licensed Ford Granadas all the way into the mid-1980s.
The factory that would assemble the Cortina was up and producing cars in an incredibly short six months. Hyundai’s construction engineers, workers, and a team of Ford engineers all lived together on-site during the build, putting in sixteen-hour days without pause.
This sort of relentless labor sparked the roaring economic furnace that the Republic of Korea still enjoys today. Having come through occupation, war, and deprivation, the workforce was eager to set their shoulders against the wheel.
The British Invasion

Tasked by government officials to create a more domestically-produced car, Hyundai sought out expertise from the U.K. It seems strange today to be asking the British Leyland of the mid-1970s how to build cars—one tends to think of the memorable Top Gear cheap British Leyland challenge episode, where Jeremy Clarkson opened the door of his Rover SD1 only to have the interior panel wedge in the door frame.
However, while labor relations and boardroom battles marred this era of automaking in the U.K., British Leyland’s execs still knew how to get things done. Hyundai successfully lured over Sir George Turnbull, who was at loose ends following his resignation as Managing Director of British Leyland. Turnbull had performed his own economic miracle over a couple of previous years running Austin-Morris, taking it from multi-million dollar losing concern to overall profitability. Rolls-Royce even offered him a position in their aero engine division, but he saw the opportunity to do something unique with the Koreans.

The task was monstrous. This new car had to be designed from scratch, and the brand new factory that would eventually build it was then just empty waste ground—a swamp, in fact. However, Turnbull had taken a parting gift from British Leyland with him: two Morris Marinas. He also persuaded a small team of British engineers to join him in Korea, men from Girling Brakes and Vauxhall.
Turnbull deployed his forces like a general, scouring the world to collect the best manufacturing equipment then available. The sheetmetal presses came from France, some of the welding equipment came from British Leyland, and a deal was struck to use Mitsubishi-sourced engines.
Arriving at the just-opened factory in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental, Turnbull oversaw a traditional Korean blessing ceremony to open it. From ground-breaking to mass production took just under one year, though it’s worth noting that the factory did not have functional heating even as cars started rolling off the line. (In an interesting footnote, Turnbull would later end up also being responsible for Iran’s people’s car, the Paykan.)
The Pony car

By 1975 standards, the first Pony was a very conventional car, similar to something like the contemporary Mazda GLC. Styling was by Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign, who penned the original as a coupe concept, shown at the 1974 Turin Auto Show. The production version was a four-door sedan, soon joined by a pickup-like utility coupe, and a useful four-door hatchback.

The layout was very conventional for the time: front-mounted engine, rear-wheel-drive, modest four-cylinder power. Transmission choice was a four-speed manual or eventually a three-speed automatic, and performance was nothing to shout about. First-generation Ponys were imported into the U.K., and a British magazine clocked a 0-60 mph time of 15.3 seconds.
Part of the reason Hyundai doesn’t celebrate its Pony more in North America is perhaps its boom-and-bust arrival in the Canadian market. It was introduced at the very low price of $5900 and was one of the best-selling cars in Canada in 1984. Problem was, Canadian winters were even tougher than Korean ones, and the Pony suffered a high attrition rate. Even so, with more than 25,000 sold in 1984, they were a common sight on the road for decades. In the 1995 Jackie Chan movie, Rumble in the Bronx, which has Vancouver standing in for NYC, you can see Hyundai Ponys driving past about once every five minutes.
They are nearly all gone now. Some years back, I tracked down a low-mileage example that had been recently acquired by a Korean-Canadian man that planned to ship the car back to Seoul. It was a GL model with the 70-horse 1.4-liter engine, minimal options and a manual transmission (it didn’t even have a tachometer).

Having also driven a well-preserved Mazda GLC owned by Mazda of North America, the economy-car similarities were obvious. The difference is that the Hyundai was almost a decade older than the Mazda, but felt at the same technological level. The Pony was fine as a 1970s car, but considering how quickly the Honda Civic was developing in the 1980s, it was outclassed.
And yet, the Pony managed to persevere. It would take Hyundai decades to shed its economy-minded roots, just as had been the case with the Japanese marques earlier, but there were good cars here and there within the subsequent Hyundai lineup. The V-6 Tiburon coupe was a bit interesting. Remember the rear-wheel-drive Genesis coupe you could get with a turbo-four or a V-6 and a manual gearbox? A little overlooked.

Today, Hyundai seems to be vacillating a little on whether or not to build a production version of the N Vision 74 concept. Powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and battery pack, it takes the original Pony coupe concept into the future, putting 670 hp to the rear wheels. In a world where the crossover is king, it’s one of the most exciting vehicles of the last few years.
Should that not come to fruition, the ulitmate Pony does exist. Khyzyl Saleem, the designer behind the TWR Supercat, penned a widebody drift car based on a Pony hatchback, complete with the 2.0L turbocharged four-cylinder out of a Genesis Coupe, good for around 420 hp. Built by Peaches, a fashion brand out of Korea, it was shown off last year at an event in Poland.
At fifty, the Hyundai Pony seems an unlikely icon. But for Hyundai to become the third-largest automaker in the world, it had to start by building its first car. Here’s hoping the Vision 74 makes it into production. It’d be a well-deserved birthday present for a little economy car that could, and did.

I first remember seeing the Hyundai Pony at the Toronto Auto Show in 1984. I was harassing the sales staff as a precocious teen by asking about the Hawaiian vacations the sales managers scored, how these cars were dumped on Canadian shores for a lower price than in South Korea, etc.
The final straw came when I hooked the battery cables back up then urged unsuspecting children to press the horn button. That got me kicked out of their display area.
Karma got me back a few years later when my driving lessons were done in a Pony. Those cars (and Dodge Calibers) are what car enthusiasts are forced to drive in Hell.
Don’t forget the current Mitsubishi Mirage in that select group of Hellish cars!
Renault Le Car.
I had a job working for Mitchell Manuals in the product support department. I remember getting calls from mechanics in Canada requesting information for the Hyundai Pony. We had a library of information from all manufacturers including Hyundai. The repair manuals were probably made at a printing company that made coloring books for kids. You would find a picture of a donkey in the section on engine repair, a picture of an elephant in the electrical section and a giraffe in the brake section. I guess if you couldn’t fix the car you had something to elevate stress!
Kia & Hyundai have long lost their throwaway car rep. They get better ratings than some Hondas & are very good cars. Except for the Kia Soul that seem to have a catch on fire problem. My used 2017 Forte got 40-45 mpg at freeway speeds with the a/c going. My 2021 gets 45-49 mpg with 40 around town being the norm. Rldes good, wont where you out on a long drive, & will drive & handle like a sports car.
It kind of looks like an 80’s Mazda 323 in a way. An unremarkable start, but we all have to start somewhere.
From the late 70s’ to the mid 80s’ I worked at National Acme machine tool company (Eng. dept) in Cleveland Ohio making multiple spindle machines.The company has long been out of business now. In the mid 80s’ we were building many machines for Hyundai for their factories setting up for global production. The machines were for machining raw cast pistons to a finished product and machines for machining large round transmission components. Based on memory, the machines were large and costly ( 1/2 million $ each). Seemed like one per week went out, on a truck to a railyard for putting on a boat to ship to South Korea.
I worked at an engine shop in Vancouver in the 80’s and I remember the cylinder heads cracking beyond repair. No wrecker heads available, so new units were installed.
I don’t remember the Pony as much as I do the Excel. These were indeed throwaway cars, as I know 2 people who did just that – abandoned them at streetside.
They were so cheap to buy that many cash-poor kids would end up with a 5 year old Excel for next to nothing. It did the job with very little maintenance.
Here’s an obscure fact you’ve never likely thought about: a pair of rear fenders for a ’62-66 Studebaker Lark 4 door will fit perfectly on the floor behind the driver’s seat of a Pony. With the split rear seat folded down, of course.
l know this because 3 of us Studebaker enthusiasts took a friend’s 1400 cc Pony to South Bend for a swap meet with the hope of using very little gas. Loaded with parts, and people, you had to make sure the engine was revving to make enough torque before letting out the clutch!
The trip was successful, and to put the times into perspective, those decent used fenders cost me $18.00 – for the PAIR!
My friend liked the Pony enough to trade it in on another Hyundai – an up-scale Stellar. Remember those?
I rode in a rented circa 1985 Pony Automatic in England, to describe I quoted a Road & Track editor’s take on the home market Yugo “a dour little device best suited to be a car bomb”. the Giugiaro styling looked OK but it was underpowered and the interior was worse than an early oughts Dodge. The Austin Metro we swapped it for may have been spartan but it rode and drove so much better.
The FWD Excel that was the first Hyundai in the US was an order of magnitude better despite being a warmed over Dodge Colt
I remember the first Hyundai Ponies. For those that remember, every early Pony I saw was covered in rust. My question was always, was the rust factory, or dealer installed?
A fascinating story.
An EXCELLENT and interesting article!
And yes, Chung Ju-yung IS the most inspirational automotive figure I’d never heard of.
And a Hyundai history article is now one of the most fascinating I never would have imagined.