Watch: TG chats to Hyundai design chief Simon Loasby about the Ioniq 6

We know what you’re thinking: has Hyundai’s design department just dropped the ball spectacularly for the first time in years?

To put it kindly the new Ioniq 6 is, er, challenging, but you may need to do a bit of internet cross-referencing to fully assimilate what you’re looking at here, because this is a car that doesn’t shy away from its influences. And what influences they are.

Hyundai’s HG Wells-style time machine stopped off in the mid-Seventies for the rapturously received Ioniq 5, but this time we whirl further back to the Twenties and Thirties, a spectacularly creative time for automotive and transport design.

Back then, streamlining was all the rage, and the results were often fascinatingly barmy. Nothing has changed. So let Top Gear Magazine’s Jason Barlow give you a design deep dive with head of Hyundai styling, Simon Loasby.