Hyundai’s Le Fil Rouge concept has a big, stupid grille

Hyundai is at the Geneva Motor Show with a concept that is supposed to show off the company’s future design direction. That future, apparently, includes a big stupid grille.

The car is called the Le Fil Rouge, which is French for “common thread,” a nod to how Hyundai is trying to connect its past, present, and future designs with this concept. The company says that the Le Fil Rouge is a “reinterpretation” of the 1974 Hyundai “Pony” Coupe Concept, which set the design for its earliest cars.

In some oblique ways, the body of this new concept resembles that early forebear. The overall silhouette somewhat resembles a more smoothed, stretched-out version of the Pony concept, though with none of the hard angles that were all the rage in the 1970s. The new concept is a bit staid, in my eyes; the recently announced Infiniti Q Inspiration, another concept that’s meant to establish a new identity for its respective brand, does a lot of the same things with the shape of the car but in far more exciting ways.

One place the Le Fil Rouge abruptly splits from the design of Hyundai’s first concept, though, is that enormous grille. It gives the Le Fil Rouge such a big, goofy grin that it looks like the car is laughing at Hyundai’s decision. Hyundai calls it a “Cascading Grille,” which is appropriate, because it spans nearly the entire front end of the car, engulfing the headlights like rocks swallowed up by flowing lava.

Giant grilles are a popular trend in cars, especially concepts. Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Nissan are all guilty, and Lexus has practically built its entire brand around the idea. It’s strange because, with the push to electric technology, the need for a big radiator on the front of a car actually drops. After all, that’s why Tesla got rid of its fake grille on the Model S; it now features smooth, almost uninterrupted body work on the front of all its cars.

I’m not saying that’s the only way to go, but you’d think that removing a constraint like the necessity of a functional grille would free designers up to try a wide variety of new ideas. Instead, it feels like they’re all going for broke trying to race each other to see who can cover the entire front end the most. (To be fair to Hyundai, it doesn’t say whether the Le Fil Rouge is explicitly electric. As a design project meant to set the tone for the whole lineup, it probably won’t be one or the other.)

All this said, I adore the inside of the Le Fil Rouge. I’m a sucker for a wood finish, and this concept has that in spades. It also has these stylish displays for rear-seat passengers that sort of drip down from the curved shape of the front seats. It’s an idea that probably has little chance of making it to production, but it looks far more exciting than most embedded or bolted-on rear-seat displays.

Hyundai has always been a bit scattershot (and derivative) with its design, so watching it set a fresh direction with this new concept is exciting. I also think it’s great that it apparently calls back to that first concept. The resemblance to Bruce from Finding Nemo, though? Not as much.