ABSTRACT
While Chung Ju Yung and his men pieced cars and trucks together from junk in the Hyundai Motor Works in the late 1940s, he had no idea of going into motor vehicle production then, or a decade later. The subcompacts that Hyundai began exporting to the United States — and the world — in the 1980s were not even the direct descendants of those early jerry-built creations. They were, more accurately, cousins, several times removed. The manufacture of motor vehicles from original designs made largely of locally produced parts was beyond the remotest fantasies of anyone in Korea at that time. Until he went into politics in his old age, Chung did not deal in fantasy.
