Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (23 page)

Hyundai wanted Europeans to know the car was made for them, by them, on the Continent. The i30 embodied Hyundai’s philosophy of designing and building, as completely as possible, its cars within the markets they are destined for. Some other carmakers had what is called a “world car” philosophy: Make a car vanilla enough that it will theoretically sell everywhere in the world. Hyundai, per its character, went the opposite way. Before a region-specific car was launched, Hyundai designers, engineers, and product teams spent months in the target market, learning not only the customer preferences there but absorbing the culture and ethos of the place. In the years before Hyundai launched its Eon subcompact in India, for instance, Hyundai designers spent weeks traversing the country, touring ancient architecture, making sketches of temples, examining the curve of lotus flowers, talking to Indians, looking for universally understood design elements in the culture that might be referenced and signified in the Eon as well as features that Indians wanted in their cars. Eon, for instance, had a higher ceiling than its segment rivals. Why? Sikh turbans. Hyundai did the same for new cars built specifically for and in the Russian, Chinese, and Brazilian markets.

Hyundai even made modifications for the U.S. market. My car in Korea, for instance, the large Hyundai Grandeur sedan, had a glossy black surface on its center console, a finish known in the industry as “piano black.” The same car sold in the U.S. as the Azera has a matte finish. The first Azeras shipped to the U.S. also had the piano black finish, but too many customers complained that they showed smudgy fingerprints. So the Azera product team switched to the matte finish for the U.S. cars, which doesn’t show fingerprints as obviously. Your first question may be “Don’t Koreans care about fingerprint smudges?” The answer, I think, is that Korean drivers simply don’t have smudgy fingers. Koreans rarely eat in their cars, and Americans have made a culture of
the practice. A Hyundai colleague told the story of her time as an exchange student in the U.S. She and her host family went through a McDonald’s drive-through to pick up dinner, which was familiar enough to her. But when they started eating in the car, she said, “I was horrified.”

It’s easy to see, then, that building a successful car for a particular market is like writing a dissertation on its culture and sociology.

The initial reaction from the automotive press milling about the i30 in Frankfurt was positive. They said it was a sign of the company’s maturation and upmarket ambitions, satisfyingly conveying our messaging. But no amount of praise from auto journalists could compare to what shockingly came next. As a PR guy, I wish I could claim credit for it, because it would have been a career maker. But I cannot.

It is common for rival automaker CEOs to stroll the floor of motor shows checking out the competition, usually with a few top executives in tow. These visits are designed to
not
make news. The CEOs meander somewhat detachedly around their competition, not showing too much enthusiasm, not asking too many questions. That’s what usually happens.

Usually.

Shortly after our i30 press conference concluded, VW CEO Martin Winterkorn appeared at our booth. Six feet tall and fit like a slab of Black Forest oak, with silver hair and all-business mien, Winterkorn was a striding example of Teutonic gravity. He is a colossus in the auto industry. Or, rather, he was, before a hard-to-believe scandal would come to rock VW and end Winterkorn’s career. In 2015 it was discovered—partly by some engineers at my alma mater, West Virginia University, no less—that VW had been cheating diesel emissions tests all over the world. Their engineers had gotten too clever and invented an algorithm
for their diesel cars that told the car when it was being tested for emissions. When it detected that the car was hooked up to a tester, the algorithm switched on the car’s emissions controls, making the exhaust cleaner. When the test was over, the algorithm switched off the emissions controls—improving gas mileage and performance but also increasing the car’s pollution by as much as 40 percent. It was a calamitous bet. When the cheat was discovered, it shocked the auto industry and destroyed the confidence of thousands of people who had bought the diesel VWs specifically because they were told VW diesels pollute less than gasoline-powered cars. For them, this was more than a carmaker trying to hide a defective part or putting off a recall: VW had desecrated their religion. As of this writing, it’s unclear how dire VW’s fate will be. Toyota’s sales rebounded from its crisis. But this one is worse. VW’s stock was punished; the company may face billions of dollars in fines from multiple governments (the cheating algorithm was installed in at least 11 million cars around the world): the brand was crippled; a pall was cast on diesel cars everywhere; and some VW officials may even end up in jail.

It would turn out that, back in 2011, when Winterkorn stepped into our booth in Frankfurt, the diesel deception had already been in place for more than two years. Engineers at other automakers were wondering how VW was making such clean-diesel cars and just assumed VW had better engineers. Such was VW’s reputation for world-beating technology and engineering.

Winterkorn was the personification of this supremacy, and his every move was watched. When he came to our booth, he was accompanied by Klaus Bischoff, his head of design. Winterkorn circled the blue i30, peering down over his aristocratic, hawk-like nose, surveying it as a lion might a downed antelope. He pulled a pen from his pocket and probed at the car’s open hatchback.

Then he walked around the front of the car, opened the driverside door, and got in.

Inside, Winterkorn appeared to forget where and who he was. It seems hard to imagine, because dozens of auto journalists were watching him, amazed by what was happening in front of them. This was a mountain-comes-to-Muhammad moment. All I could think was that, in his mind, he was no longer the CEO of the world’s number two automaker. Instead, he seemed to be a young engineer again, unguarded, incapable of stopping himself from curiously probing a fellow student’s very interesting-looking experiment.

Winterkorn grabbed the i30’s steering wheel, reached underneath, and flipped the lever that allows a driver to adjust the wheel up and down. He flipped it again. He called out to his chief designer and began barking questions in German:

“Bischoff!”

Bischoff walked over.

Winterkorn: “This doesn’t rattle.”

Bischoff tried the lever. It didn’t rattle.

Winterkorn, somewhat sternly: “BMW can’t do it, we can’t do it,” meaning neither BMW nor VW could prevent their steering wheel adjustment levers from rattling.

“We had a solution,” Bischoff responded, surely regretting the words as they were coming out of his mouth, “but it was too expensive.” Brilliant. I could not have summed up Hyundai’s value proposition better or more succinctly.

Winterkorn snapped, “
Warum kann’s der?
” Or: “Why can they do it?” Then he gave the i30’s driver’s-side vanity mirror cover a little ticked-off flip back and forth and exited the vehicle.

This scene would have been remarkable enough had it played out only in front of the assembled automotive journalists and stunned Hyundai employees. But it was not. Turned out, it was
all being filmed. Seconds after Winterkorn settled into the i30’s driver’s seat, a video shooter popped into the backseat and filmed over Winterkorn’s right shoulder. The video posted to YouTube almost immediately. Winterkorn never realized what was happening. Or, amazingly, never cared. What unfolded was beyond anything anyone at Hyundai could have ever hoped for or thought up—no guerrilla marketing team would have chanced it—and it probably sent beautifully engineered office chairs flying from windows of VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters the next day as the YouTube numbers kept piling up.

It is hard to explain to someone outside the auto industry the impact this had. The video has nearly 2 million views. Articles were written about it. It became lore on the motor show circuit, with auto journalists still mentioning it to me two years after it happened. Looking back, I believe the “Winterkorn Incident,” as I came to think of it, did as much for Hyundai’s aspirations to move upmarket as anything else I saw during my three years at the company.

A few giddy hours after we had ruined Martin Winterkorn’s motor show, we held our media reception. Some two hundred reporters showed up for free food and drink, and a number of our Korean and European executives mingled. The vice chairman shocked everyone and showed up, too. He worked the room like a pro, answering journalists’ questions and offering frank appraisals of his company’s strengths and weaknesses. Reporters asked about the Winterkorn Incident, and he was gracious and demure in response, complimenting the VW brand. I was thrilled to see him winning over the reporters, but a little dispirited as well, thinking, “If I could get you to do this all the time, we’d be the most popular auto brand in the world,” all the while knowing it was impossible.

Toward the end of the evening, my boss, Mr. Lee, pulled me
aside and, out of nowhere, offered me the chance to spend a few months working back in the U.S. in 2013. This had never been broached; it had never occurred to me. Mostly because my contract ran only until October 2012, when Rebekah’s posting in Seoul was set to end and she’d be sent to another assignment, most likely back to the U.S. for several months to learn another foreign language before being sent overseas again. I had mentioned this to my boss—in passing, I believed. Apparently, Hyundai had taken it to heart and had a longer-term plan for me.

“I know that your wife will return to the U.S. after her two years at the embassy in Seoul,” he said. “I will work it out so that you can work from there for a few months while she’s there.”

I could barely believe what I was hearing. This was shockingly generous and, I believed, a real sign of how Westernized and progressive the company was striving to become. I thanked him profusely and called Rebekah as soon as I could to tell her the good news. She was equally floored. We could not believe the blessing. We started to sketch out what an additional two years would look like with me in Korea and Rebekah . . . somewhere else. Could it work out? Would the State Department accommodate her? Would it be possible for Rebekah to extend her posting in Korea? Those were questions for a later time. Right now Rebekah and I talked and laughed together on the phone—me in Germany, her in Korea—like two kids who just got told the next year will have an extra Christmas.

13

THE CHAIRMAN ARRIVES

One Sunday evening several months after we’d got Lily, our Korean Jindo dog, Rebekah and I pulled up to our house after returning from a weekend trip. We had hired a neighborhood boy to walk Lily a couple times a day and feed her. While in the house, Lily would be kept in the combination kitchen and breakfast nook, a large area with a tile floor and lockable doors at each end. We had done this before with Lily to good effect.

Rebekah was first in the door and I followed with suitcases. She walked out of my sight toward the back of the house and the kitchen to see Lily. The next thing I heard was Rebekah shriek.

I dropped the suitcases and hurriedly rushed to Rebekah to see her stopped in her tracks and looking at something neither of us could initially process: a hole in the bottom right of the still-locked wooden kitchen door, about nine inches high and twelve inches wide. The edges of the hole were sharp wooden shards; sawdust was piled on the floor on either side of the door.

Our first thought was that someone had broken in and harmed Lily. Panicked, I called, “Lily!
Where are you?
”

Lily, it turned out, was in the kitchen. She poked her head through the hole in the door. Then she hopped through the hole and ran up to us, affectionately. It became instantly clear to both of us what had happened. In the twenty-four hours since she had last been walked and fed by the neighbor boy, Lily had systematically and relentlessly chewed a hole in the wooden kitchen door because she wanted out.

This was remarkable. We had seen her gnaw around door-frames and on various items, but never through a piece of wood with the raw, ceaseless determination of John Henry battling the steam drill.

This was not a solid hardwood door, but it was not a hollow-core door, either. It had heft to it. It stood between her and what she wanted, which was the other side. I photographed the door and produced the picture upon request, because no one ever believes me when I tell the story.

It was at this moment that, finally, Lily’s true character came into sharp focus. She was the Terminator. And she was in our house.

There’s a line from the first
Terminator
movie that described the Arnold Schwarzenegger killing machine:

Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

That was our Lily. It was chilling to watch how dispassionately she pursued her savagery and depredation: never a bark, never a threatening move. Only the swift, silent velocity of cold-blooded purpose.

It’s worth noting that the South Korean military’s alert status, like the U.S. DEFCON system, is called Jindogae, or “Jindo dog.” Jindogae 1 is the highest level of alert, meaning an attack is imminent.

Lily was always at Jindogae 1.

On the day after Thanksgiving 2011, Rebekah and I had returned from shopping on base. Lily was in the backyard. We had several bags to carry in, so I propped open the front door. Rebekah, unaware that the front door was open, let Lily in the back door and, in a second, she was out the front door and loose, off her leash. I didn’t realize this until, standing at the trunk of our car, I looked down and saw her looking up at me, tongue wagging.

A cold chill hit me. All sorts of terrible scenarios ran through my head. I put down the bag of groceries slowly, so as not to startle her. I felt like I was looking at a two-year-old who had somehow gotten hold of a loaded gun. “Easy, Lily,” I said, as I slowly went for her collar . . .