Hyundai Motor’s ‘i-Blue’

By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter

Hyundai Motor, the top South Korean automaker, has adopted ``Blue’’ as a trademark for its ``clean cars’’ as part of efforts to lead the latest industry trend of environment-friendly management, according to the company Monday.

While the color generally represents a clean image as used in expressions like the ``blue sky’’ and ``blue sea,’’ it is also employed in the company logo which puts an ``H’’ mark inside an oval drawn in the blue color on the white background.

``All our environment-friendly cars will have names hyphenated with the word `blue,’ which would comprise all the eco-friendly technologies of Hyundai Motor,’’ said a senior executive of the automaker.

Hyundai Motor first introduced a car with the trade name ``blue’’ at the Frankfurt Motor Show last September -- a concept fuel-cell vehicle with the name ``i-Blue.’’

Hyundai Motor, which forms the world’s sixth-largest automotive group with its affiliate Kia Motors, set up global environment management in 2003 to develop hybrid and fuel-cell cars as well as vehicles with high fuel efficiency.

Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group also set up a research center in 2005 for the development of eco-friendly vehicles. And the i-Blue, which was the result of such efforts, featured the group’s latest in-house developed fuel cell stack.

It now plans to introduce three other eco-friendly models ― the ``i10 Blue,’’ ``i10 Blue CNG’’ and ``i30 Blue’’ ― at the Geneva Motor Show, which will kick off in Switzerland on March 4.

``We enjoyed a warm response at the Frankfurt Motor Show with the trade name `blue.’ So we have decided to adopt it as a term that represents the company’s environment-friendly strategies,’’ a company spokesman said.

According to the company, the three models to make their debut in Geneva are models which, though equipped with traditional internal-combustion engines, have a significantly smaller emission of carbon dioxide.

Company officials said that some of its eco-friendly cars were developed to meet the environmental regulations of the European Union, which has set a limit on carbon dioxide emissions of 140 grams per kilometer from this year.

``Usually, the performance of a vehicle is meant to deteriorate when the carbon dioxide emission is reduced,’’ said the company spokesman. ``But our new technology to be unveiled this time has overcome the dilemma.’’

jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr