► Racy Hyundai Insteroid concept revealed
► The Inster is beefed up and juiced up
► Inspired by mobile gamers, ‘for the next generation’
Hyundai’s beefed up its cutesy Inster city car to create this: the Insteroid. Described as a ‘bolder statement, harnessing unrestrained creativity to deepen the emotional connection with the Hyundai brand,’ it reimagines the perky new Inster electric car as some kind of raging muscle freak binging on energy drinks.
It’s ‘pure fun’, according to Simon Loasby, senior vice president and head of Hyundai’s design centre, and it’s meant to really pull and stretch what Hyundai can create with such a small car.
‘The design presentation for this was probably the easiest of my career,’ Nicola Danza, exterior design manager for Hyundai Europe, tells CAR. ‘It was so cool from the first sketches that when they were shown to the CEO, he just said ‘build it’ and walked back out of the room.’
Hyundai has very clearly taken some inspiration from the fully-functional RN24 concept, which effectively looked like a mutated, rally-spec Inster in itself. The Insteroid, though, is a ‘different beast’ according to Danza – not least because the Insteroid only moves slowly for manoeuvring. That said, the Insteroid still features an extremely wide track, super fat tyres with ‘track-optimised’ wheels and a rear wing so big you could do your ironing on it. Those enormous wheelarches feature integrated vents that release pressure in the wheel wells, too.
All of this is exaggerated because the Insteroid has more than its fair share of design influence taken from gaming and the yoofs of today. ‘We need to think of the next generation, and we cannot be designing SUVs all the time – young people still want small cars’ says Danza. ‘We wanted to make this almost like a poster car for the kids.’
Inside, Hyundai’s designers are keen to point that it does still use the bare space of a regular Inster, but is almost race-spec. As well as a proper roll cage, bucket seats and a pared back design with a massive drift handbrake, the Insteroid comes with a ‘message grid’ that allows drivers to display messages when driving. The cockpit also features a ‘3D-knit’ fabric material made from recycled yarn.
It also sounds like Hyundai’s nicked some of the RN24’s technology, too, as the Insteroid features a drift mode – perfect to go with that drift handbrake then. Hyundai’s not forgotten about sound either, saying the Insteroid ‘produces a unique sound, leaving an unforgettable impression.’ Various animations and graphics brighten up the wild cabin, and the Insteroid even features speakers directed outward so the car can be used as a massive roving audio platform.
Of course, this is all just for show. Hyundai has no plans to make a wild Inster – at least one to this degree – and it is effectively a design study and one for the European design team to take the lead on. Even so, at least it proves that Hyundai still likes to do things for the hell of it.