Audi Repair Shop Doylestown
Call 267 279 9477 to schedule a appointment
This is the year of
N Performance. After three official launches, the division’s leadership has made imprecise
since this summer.
Brand boss Albert Biermann said
, “Right now, we don’t need a halo car in N. We have to get in a routine with N cars, and not just hit a peak.” Around the same time, VP Thomas Schmera said, “Rest assured we are coming up with something,” that something being a halo car. Reports expected either a two-seat coupe or a four-door sedan like the
. In a recent interview with
AutoRAI
, Schmera narrowed the focus, saying, “Think of the Hyundai RM16 and you have a bit of an idea of what is possible.”
The RM16 is the third iteration of the
first showed at the Busan Motor Show in 2014. In 2015
at the same motor show,
. By then, the performance specs listed a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder with 296 horsepower, an electric compressor and electronic differential, rear-wheel drive and a six-speed manual. The bodywork, draped on an aluminum spaceframe, channeled the spirits of other outrageous mid-engined hatchbacks like the
,
Clio V6
Sport, and
Delta
.
Four months after showing the RM16,
Hyundai took a running prototype
to the Nürburgring (pictured). Earlier this year we
heard tale of a new Theta III engine
suited for front- and rear-wheel drive, and mid-engined applications. With the ability to be tuned to 350 hp, this led to suspicion that there could be a mid-engined Hyundai
on the way. The evidence is circumstantial, but now we have Schmera telling us to consider a long-lived mid-engined concept as the potential template for a future N Performance halo car.
The idea of Hyundai rolling out a mid-engined coupe sounds crazy. It sounds doubly crazy when
Biermann has said of the i30 N
, “This is a halo car that can make [the company] money, so what better halo can we get?” Hyundai knows its math better than we do, but we don’t see how the carmaker makes money in a segment ruled by the
718 twins under $100K, and by a number of storied brands above that figure. The triple crazy comes when Schmera told the Dutch outlet in the same interview, “This is going to be a great machine, something nobody expects from Hyundai, something really exotic,” and, “It will be a car in the super sport segment….”
Whatever is on the way, it could be a limited edition, it
, and it likely won’t break cover for a couple of years, but we’re already looking forward to it.
Related Video:
from Autoblog https://ift.tt/2Jk6Ts8