Hyundai celebrated a momentous occasion at the world renowned Sunbeam Studios in London yesterday evening, 26th November.
The event heralded the end of a mission: To photograph all 2,092 miles of, ‘The Knowledge’, the cabbies London road network that encompasses every back street and corner of central London.
The ‘A Streetcar Named Hyundai’ project was undertaken over 50 days with 127 people taking it in turns to drive stints that had been pre-mapped by Ordnance Survey, helping to make sure every inch of road was covered.
The vehicle of choice was a single Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell that made light of London’s difficult road and traffic conditions with its excellent electric drive system and lack of range anxiety from its hydrogen fuel cell derived energy. Being a fuel cell vehicle, the only emissions emitted by the ix35 was water.
In total, 503,919 photographs were taken of London’s streets that were stitched together to form a video lasting just 200.5 seconds. This enormous amount of data necessitated in bespoke new software being created to cope with all the 207,000MB of data recorded.
After 409 hours of driving, the result is a spectacular – if a little difficult to watch – stop motion styled unique view of London. A mosaic image of Oxford Street was also created using stills from the voyage around London (click below to enlarge – N.B. large 12MB picture).
Alongside this achievement, Tony Whitehorn, Hyundai Motor UK’s President and CEO proudly announced Hyundai’s growth in the UK market. This year, 2015, marks one million cars sold by the company – a staggering achievement considering it’s relative market place age is only around fifteen years.
To celebrate the occasion, Hyundai will give away a brand new Tucson crossover to a nominated, ‘one in a million’. Simply head over to any of Hyundai’s social media accounts and state who your ‘one in a million’ is to nominate them as a candidate to win the car. See the hashtag #M1LLION on Twitter for more info.
Looking to the future, we can expect good things from the Korean car maker, who has also announced their intention to bring no less than 22 ‘low-emission’ vehicles to market by 2020. This is a huge undertaking for the company that presently has not had much impact in the low-emission sector.
Cars like the ix35 Fuel Cell are a good start, but replacements and technological developments plus a range of plug-in hybrid and battery electric cars are promised to be on their way using the sustainable mobility ‘N’ sub-brand.
More information can be found at www.astreetcarnamedhyundai.com
