Hyundai Excel
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While the first-gen Excel may be one of the rarest 1980s cars in North America nowadays, we can jump into the next decade and find another Hyundai that's nearly as hard to find: the Scoupe. While Saddam was gearing up for The Mother of All Battles, Hyundai was improving on the Excel--the bar was set Death Valley-low for that goal--and selling a sporty coupe based on the second-gen version. I hadn't thought about the Scoupe (pronounced "scoop" in North America and "ess-cooPAY" in the UK) for many years, but then I ran across this doomed example in a Los Angeles junkyard last week. Hyundai...
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Guilty Pleasure: 1986 Hyundai Excel
What makes a normally undesirable car become desirable? In the case of the first Hyundai sold in the United States, it's a combination of historical significance and historical awfulness. Nowadays, Americans see Hyundai as a manufacturer of some very high-quality cars, but it wasn't always so. Far...
Murilee Martin