How This Legendary South Korean Designer Changed Global Auto Design, and What He's Doing Today
SangYup Lee still runs Hyundai and Genesis design. An Automotive News All-Star in August, he has Ioniq 9 on U.S. lots, a new Tucson, and a pickup Hyundai has never sold.
SEOUL — Walk a Hyundai lot in 2026 and the cars don't disappear into the next row. The Ioniq 5 still wears those pixel lights. The Ioniq 6 looks like it was drawn in a wind tunnel.
SangYup Lee joined Hyundai in 2016, took over the design center in 2018, and became executive vice president in 2021. He is head of Hyundai and Genesis global design. Automotive News named him an All-Star design executive on August 31.
He didn't grow up around cars. He studied sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul, then visited ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena and watched a student work a clay model. He told Motor1 last year he thought he could do that too, and enjoy it. He left for California to study car design.
Classmates had grown up with cars. He hadn't. Internships in Europe, then a decade at General Motors, where he was the exterior designer who took the fifth-generation Camaro from a 2005 concept through production. Volkswagen and Bentley followed. At Bentley he ran exterior design on the Continental GT.
The Hyundai brief was cars people would notice, and a Genesis you could pick out without the badge.
The Ioniq 5 made the argument public. It took World Car of the Year in 2022. Lee kept the Santa Fe boxy for space and made the Ioniq 9 rounded for aero. His line: in car design, form has to follow function.
When he's in the United States, he walks Costco lots and asks what would make his car special in that crowd.
The cars on U.S. lots now came out of his shop. Ioniq 9 deliveries started in May 2025. The three-row electric SUV is built in Georgia and starts at $58,955 before destination.
His shop just showed the next Tucson in Paju, a squared-off fifth generation with rear doors that open wider for a child seat.
The next new thing is a truck Hyundai has never sold. The company showed the Boulder concept in New York in April, a body-on-frame SUV study that previews a midsize pickup due by 2030. It is one of 36 new or refreshed Hyundais aimed at North America this decade.
If you're shopping the cars that came out of that shop, the Ioniq 5 versus Model Y versus EV6 compare is the electric shortlist. The Tucson hybrid three-way is the gas-and-hybrid one.
Lee said he doesn't consider himself a Korean designer. To do the job well you need a global eye, and he is starting to think about how to pass the work to younger people, the way his mentors did for him.
The lot already looks different. The next test is whether a Hyundai truck can do to pickups what the Ioniq 5 did to crossovers.