How Hyundai seeks to turn casual fans into hardcore enthusiasts

Are You Experienced?

Of course, you can’t just suddenly announce to the world that you’re cool. It didn’t work when you were in middle school and it won’t work now.

So Hyundai has been playing the long game for several years, ever since it hired former BMW M Chief Albert Biermann to head its performance N division. Biermann is now semi-retired, but he leaves behind a legacy of performance cars and international race wins that certainly put Hyundai on even footing with companies like Honda, which have long been synonymous with compact car performance and deep fanboy appeal.

Now that the on-road product end of things is worked out, Hyundai is backing it up with an experiential product in the U.S. that it rolled out in Europe and Asia a couple years ago: the Hyundai Driving Experience. 

A fresh fleet of N-spec Elantras and Konas greeted Hyundai Driving Experience participants at Sonoma Raceway. After a quick briefing, we spent the day on in-car exercises. Photograph Courtesy Hyundai

The event borrows a model from many top-tier sports car brands like AMG, BMW and Porsche, where owners can take a deep dive into the abilities of their cars and learn to control and even exploit the generous performance envelopes. 

The key difference here is one of accessibility. Where the luxury brands typically charge multiple thousands of dollars for a day of wringing out a $100,000-plus automobile, Hyundai–at the moment, anyway–is picking up the tab. Of course, the cars themselves live in a much more affordable segment of the marketplace, with a loaded Elantra N coming in under $35,000.

[The best front-drive performance cars come from Hyundai?]

We joined Hyundai at Sonoma Raceway for the program’s inaugural North American event. While Hyundai reps on site said that the structure of the event we saw was a fairly final product–indeed, Hyundai has been doing the program in other countries for a few years, so it basically ported it to U.S. soil–the shape of the event in regards to the intended audience and the full scope, number and location of events was still a work in progress. That made our Hyundai Driving Experience a sort of “soft launch,” giving the event a foothold in the States before Hyundai rips the limiter off.

Our wave–about three dozen people–consisted of a few traditional media types such as ourselves, some folks from the digital media/influencer space, and even a few Hyundai employees doing program evaluation from the consumer perspective. But while media and insiders were present, this was an event mostly populated by “civilians” who had come to the event “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” style after receiving a magic email from Hyundai.

One of the first people we ran into was a young guy wearing a Wreck Racing jacket. Andrew Kim had been part of Georgia Tech’s $2000 Challenge effort a couple of years ago, back when the team ran a Honda-powered Chevy S-10. 

[This is what happens when budget builds compete against cars more than 10 times their value | $2000 Challenge recap]

Andrew Kim of Georgia Tech’s Wreck Racing bought some Hyundai merch, then unexpectedly got an invite to the brand’s in-car fantasy camp. Photography Credit: J.G. Pasterjak

He graduated and moved on to a job at Apple, and he’d recently purchased a few pieces of N-branded merchandise from Hyundai’s website. At some point during his transaction, he also opted to receive some email updates about the HDX. When he received that update, it was in the form of an invitation to the event–which he quickly accepted.

Jahlaya Tidwell got the same email–she bought an Elantra N about a year and a half ago after a long search for her next car. She was never really a car “enthusiast” before, she admits, but she wanted something that had a bit of a special “edge” to it. 

Photography Credit: J.G. Pasterjak

“I did a lot of research, and there was a lot of buzz about the car on TikTok at the time, and I ended up really connecting with it,” she tells us. She says the Elantra N showed her that cars could be more than just a necessity, although she never imagined she’d be expressing her enthusiasm by flinging an Elantra around a race track. 

“I didn’t really even know there were things like this before I got that email inviting me to the event,” she says. “Honestly, it seemed borderline too good to be true. I definitely did a bit of vetting before I clicked the registration button. But I’m really excited I got in.” 

That part of the conversation took place after she had only completed a few of the basic exercises–before her full track laps, even. Put a pin in that; we’ll come back around to this later.

The folks who accepted the mysterious email offer were asked for a $250 deposit to hold their spot, which would be fully refundable on completion of the event. For that low price of free, participants got a night in a very nice Sonoma resort hotel the day before the driving event. That prior night also included a 1-hour safety briefing and basic driving physics lesson given by the head instructor of the Hyundai Driving Academy. There was also a short presentation from Hyundai’s partner Michelin, a social reception and dinner. 

With the participants fed and briefed, they arrived at the track the following morning–shuttled there or self-transported. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no lack of Hyundai products in the hotel parking lot.

Let’s Drive

At the track, all the participants spent the day in Hyundai-supplied Kona Ns or Elantra Ns, with one exercise taking place on a wet skidpad with rear-drive Ioniq 5s. Groups of 10 drivers–sharing five cars–spent the entire day with the same instructor, moving through a series of driving scenarios, each designed to give the drivers an increasingly fine feel for operating a car at the limit of adhesion. 

Rear-drive Ioniq 5s were used for oversteer exercises, and instructor Marc Nemeth even busted out the stopwatch for a few runs through the cones. Photograph Courtesy Hyundai

Emergency braking, hard braking while cornering, lane changes, and oversteer and understeer management were demonstrated by the various exercises, with the series of more basic driving challenges culminating in a short autocross.

After all the exercises–and, of course, lunch–it was time to hit the track. Lead-follow laps behind the instructor took up most of the afternoon, and participants ended the day thoroughly sated with plenty of track time.

Let’s take this moment to recap what was happening here: In less than a day, Hyundai instructors had taken folks who may have never felt ABS intervention before, let alone operated a tire at or beyond its grip capacity, and built their skills to the point of safe track lapping. 

Photography Credit: J.G. Pasterjak

Yes, the pace of the groups varied, but instructors were quick to shuffle students from group to group to best match the pace and comfort level of each five-car train. As a result, pace ranged from “brisk track touring” to “fully gettin’ after it” once the instructors were comfortable they had a handle on the skill of their students. 

Our particular group also contained a longtime SCCA racer, a Lemons competitor, and a couple YouTubers who spend plenty of time flinging their cars in various directions during drift and track events. Our pace was such that no one left the event feeling like they hadn’t been able to exercise the cars and their skills.

Jahlaya Tidwell bought her Elantra N knowing it was cool but had little idea of its full potential. Now she’s checking schedules for a track day. Photograph Courtesy Hyundai

Which brings us back to Jahlaya Tidwell, who started the day on the cusp of thinking cars were maybe kind of cool, and who had now completed her first-ever laps of an honest to goodness race track.

“THAT. WAS. AWESOME!” was her first reaction upon hopping out of the car and removing her helmet. “I never imagined I’d be able to do something like this. I’m going to think about my car completely differently on the drive home. I never realized what it was capable of or what I was capable of. Uh, I guess I’m a car enthusiast now?” 

Mission Accomplished?

Tidwell’s reaction seems to be right in the wheelhouse of what Hyundai is trying to accomplish here. Erik Thomas, Hyundai’s director of experiential marketing, expressed that ultimately the mission of the HDX will be to turn owners into enthusiasts and enthusiasts into evangelists, solidifying Hyundai as a legitimate contender not only in the space its products inhabit but in the culture surrounding them. Before his experience at Hyundai, Thomas also spent several years in the marketing department at Honda, a company that knows a thing or two about enjoying a dedicated fan base.

What does Thomas see as the future of the program here in the States? While no events are currently scheduled–keep an eye on hyundaihdxupdates.com for news–he reminds us that the product is fully portable. “But the more we can work with locations regularly, the better we can make it,” he says. “I’d even love to think that maybe someday there could be a dedicated space for it, like we have in South Korea.” Indeed, in Hyundai’s homeland, the company owns a specialized facility designed to host the HDX. 

Photography Credit: J.G. Pasterjak

“That’s not on the official plans at the moment,” Thomas continues, “but everyone I’ve spoken to is having a great time. And that level of excitement certainly makes it easier to keep bringing that pitch up in meetings. Hey, I have to dream big, right?”