There’s absolutely no doubting the importance of a new, electrified city SUV for a mass-market brand like Hyundai.
Such volume selling models can be make or break for a car manufacturer, so there can be no gambles taken on getting the end product right.
Which is where, of course, such a huge percentage of the billions of development dollars in such a project wind up.
But while the new Hyundai Inster BEV is crucial in a product and showroom sense, it also has a great back-story that includes lots of Aussie input.
Many would know that Hyundai has long turned to Aussie suspension specialists to refine and calibrate the suspension tunes for many of its previous offerings.
But what you mightn’t know is that the South Korean giant has been testing its cars in Australia for decades.
Covid travel restrictions put the brakes on Hyundai’s use of Australia as a testing ground for a couple of years, but it hasn’t dulled the brand’s enthusiasm for what this country has to offer in terms of testing and development.
In fact, Hyundai Australia’s product engineering boss, Hee Loong Wong, told CarsGuide that Australia offers some combinations of environments that aren’t really found anywhere else in the world.
That starts with out high (but dry) ambient heat in summer. But what stamps Australia as different is that we can experience that heat in a high-altitude setting.
For testing turbocharged petrol engines, for instance, that specific environment is hard to reproduce anywhere else.
And in terms of testing for dust sealing, engine filtering and electronics performance, our fine, red dust that also happens to be full of iron particles is among the toughest to master anywhere on the planet.
Hyundai has been aware of our rugged conditions for many years now and there’s a two-decade long history of South Korean engineering teams landing Down Under with their test gear.
Most recently, that brought the Hyundai Inster prototype to western NSW where a team of seven Hyundai engineers conducted hot-weather and incline testing on the Inster.
That team was followed by another two, with range consistency and charging characteristics the subject of examination.
The original convoy included two prototype Insters as well as a competing car in the city SUV segment.
Another factor in that 20-year history, is because our seasons are reversed from the northern hemisphere, and also because the time zones better suit the flow of information.
There’s also the fact that the distance to physically transport prototype vehicles is relatively short compared with getting a car from South Korea to, say, Death Valley.
Ironically, that season reversal has also seen Australia used as a cold-weather test centre (around Cooma in the Snowy Mountains) during the South Korean summer.
Historically, though, Hyundai’s down-under testing has predominantly been hot-weather and tow testing and, in the case of the Inster’s electric driveline has involved a lot of stop-start running.
As many as 30 Hyundai prototypes have visited Australia pre-Covid, but now the world has opened up again, the testing can be expected to resume. The Inster is the first large-scale example of that.
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