Thankfully Hyundai's upped its game since this 2008 concept

This is the Hyundai HED-5 i-Mode concept car, which was revealed by the Korean carmaker at the 2008 Geneva motor show. And what a bumper year that show was – debuts for the Volkswagen Scirocco, new Citroen Berlingo and the Ford Kuga. There was also the Land Rover LRX concept car on display, which would lead to the Evoque. Times really were a-changing.

The more we stare at the HED-5 i-Mode concept the less it looks like a car. There are lots of lines bisecting each other, but our particular favourite is the one that goes through the headlights. Then again, the chrome swooshes on either side of the doors look a bit like curtains framing an elegant interior. Maybe we’ve been staring at concept cars too long. The one bit that perhaps does look a bit out of place is the grille, which is the only sensible bit on the HED-5 i-Mode concept. Hyundai whacked it on here as a teaser trailer for its new corporate face, which would help everyone understand what was a Hyundai and what wasn’t. Of course, you’d be stuck if you were looking at the car from behind, but the rule of thumb on the motorway at the time was if it was doing 55mph in the inside lane, it was either an HGV or a Hyundai. Nowadays it could also be an EV.

This is where the pictures might be a touch deceiving – the HED-5 i-Mode is larger than it looks, it’s actually meant to be a six-seat MPV. Which is funny, because if you were to think of Hyundai MPVs of yore, you’d conjure up images of the Trajet or Matrix, the lumpy looking things your parents drove in the early 2000s. The HED-5 i-Mode concept was supposed to be a “hint” of an MPV to come, which as we’ll discover later on was about as much as translated through to a production model. 

Hyundai tried its best to make this car an elegant commentary on modern mobility – the cabin, for instance, represented “the concept of social space”, while the specially developed seats from Recaro “give the occupants a lounge atmosphere without the limitations of a conventional automotive interior layout”. What that all meant in practice was that the first row of seats could swivel around to face the back, while the middle row could slide back to create extra space.

The HED-5 i-Mode concept is immediately dated by the fact that it has a 2.2-litre diesel engine nestled under the elegantly swooping bonnet, although to be fair to Hyundai this wasn’t a modish application for concept car purposes, it was the quiet debut of the company’s R line of diesel motors, which still powers the firm’s cars today. It’s all very exciting if you’re into that sort of thing. They could have at least pretended it was hydrogen or something though.

The “self-healing water-based bodywork” is a particular highlight – scratches disappear by themselves, but would the car melt in a heavy rainstorm? The rear-hinged back doors add extra practicality for getting access to the inside of the car too. Hyundai made much of the fact when the concept was revealed that the windows and panoramic roof weren’t made of glass, but used Makrolon plastic to save weight and ultimately the planet. 

This concept car was never really a serious contender to go into production – especially not with a gargantuan name like that. Can you imagine what a Hyundai HED-5 i-Mode badge would look like on the back of the car? They would have needed to take it round the side, or write it so small that you wouldn’t even have been able to read it. At any rate, the car as it was would probably have been too expensive for Hyundai, what with its fancy leather interior, electric adjusting seats and expensive plastic windows.

We did say that Hyundai teased the fact that the HED-5 i-Mode concept was a hint at a future production car, and that car finally arrived two years later at the Geneva motor show in the form of the ix20, which carried precisely none of the innovative features the concept car had lovingly promised. Except perhaps the corporate grille. Could we muster the same level of excitement for the ix20 as for the HED-5 i-Mode concept? Yes, we probably could.