Why Hyundai’s new N brand is about more than just fast cars

“We feel our products are better than our brand’s strengths in the marketplace,” says Albert Biermann, who heads up Hyundai’s N brand after moving over from BMW’s M division. “Developing high-performance cars is a way to strengthen the brand, to bring more emotion to the brand.”

Okay, there’s some marketing speak in there. And in the end, Hyundai wouldn’t be launching N if it didn’t think there was money to be made selling hot hatches like the i30N and other performance cars.

But it feels like there really is more to N than just a ‘halo effect’. It’s about infusing a new ethos into the wider company. 

Hyundai says it settled on the N tag because the division works across Hyundai’s facilities at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany (below), and the Namyang R&D centre in Korea. The i30N has been developed at both. Again, there’s some marketing spiel in there – but a recent trip to Namyang demonstrated to me how N really is helping to infuse Hyundai with a new ethos.

Namyang, where Hyundai, Kia and Genesis models are developed, is a vast, sprawling facility. It covers nearly 3.5 million square feet, with more than 13,000 staff working in 160 buildings.

Among many other facilities, Namyang has a wind tunnel, a crash test facility and an engine and transmission development centre. At the heart of the site is a network of test tracks, built around a huge, kilometre-long straight. It’s as wide as a motorway and, frankly, almost as busy - but with a lot more camouflage livery and disguised cars than you’ll find on the M6. 

In short, it’s a big place – and it feels like it. Everyone we met during a tour of the facility was invariably polite, hospitable and welcoming, but it feels like the massive institution it is. And it’s a big institution where the target is scale: more sales, more growth, more volume.

Except in one small corner – a tiny part of Namyang that feels far more European.

On the edge of the facility, Hyundai has built a handling and performance track. Featuring elevations changes, sweeping bends, multiple off-camber corners and precious little run-off, it’s not a coincidence that it has the feel of a mini-Nürburgring. 

As part of the Namyang tour, I got to lap that track in a prototype i30N (read Matt Saunders’ expert opinion of that car here), and also to meet many of the staff from the N division. And the change in approach was notable: the N team didn’t feel like part of a vast corporation, but a small team of passionate car enthusiasts. 

That’s by design: when Hyundai attracted Biermann over from BMW, his task was to ensure the N division would make performance cars with the same level of passion and enthusiasm. The N division isn’t tasked with selling more cars; it’s about making great cars. There’s a freedom that doesn’t exist elsewhere in Namyang. Yet.

To progress that approach, members of the N team have been embedded with Hyundai’s WRC team and other motorsport programmes. And Hyundai is now starting to push that learning in the other direction: employees have been rotated into the N division and then back into the wider company.

The idea is to inject the passion for making performance cars back into the company as a whole, eventually being reflected in its models and approach.

With the addition of N, Hyundai isn’t abandoning its existing brand pillars of making value-for-money, reliable, well-designed cars. But it is adding another: performance. 

Biermann says: “Our mass production and mainstream cars will also benefit from what we do to the N vehicles. This is the latest core pillar of what we do in Hyundai.”

Yet again, that may sound like marketing speak – and, again, to some extent it is. But it’s clear that, much as the launch of the N brand has been carefully plotted, Hyundai really is taking steps to ensure it can apply what it learns from building performance cars to help in making better mass-market cars in the future.

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