AUTOS
August 10, 2005 | Dan Neil
IMITATION is the sincerest form of thievery, and no car is more sincere than the new Hyundai Sonata. The first car issued from the loins of a new billion-dollar factory in Montgomery, Ala. -- chances are you've seen the ads trumpeting Hyundai's investment in the right-to-work homeland -- the Sonata is to the Honda Accord what the tribute band Zoso is to Led Zeppelin, a startlingly faithful rendition of the original at state fair prices. But ultimately not very original.
AUTOS
June 14, 2006 | DAN NEIL
HIS nickname is M.K., but you can call him Johnny Drama. On Monday, Chung Mong-koo -- the imperious, quality- obsessed chairman of Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group, who in seven years transformed the sleepy South Korean company into an automaking powerhouse -- admitted being involved in an embezzlement scheme that, according to prosecutors, funneled $136 million to a political slush fund. Chung was arrested April 28 after a monthlong investigation and has been in jail ever since.
BUSINESS
November 14, 2008 | DAN NEIL
The chocolate-brown leather is softer than a Hershey bar in a cop's back pocket. The topstitched upholstery across the dash and doors seems sewn with a needle borrowed from Miuccia Prada. The interior wood accents are carved from the most majestic lumber in the old-growth faux forest. If you didn't know better -- and really, Hyundai would prefer you didn't know better -- you'd think the South Korean company had been at this luxury-car business a long time.
BUSINESS
December 25, 2007 | Ken Bensinger, Times Staff Writer
Hyundai Motor America named Jong Eun Kim its new head of North American operations Monday -- the latest in a string of executive shifts amid stalling U.S. sales. Kim, who takes his new post Jan. 1, will replace Ok Suk Koh, who will top Chinese operations for Kia Motors Corp. Hyundai is the largest stakeholder in Kia. Hyundai spokesman Jim Trainor called the change a "normal rotation, not unusual to the way Hyundai does business."
BUSINESS
April 29, 1998 | JOHN O'DELL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
As his bosses in Seoul struggled with bankruptcy last week, Dick Macedo was hurtling around a racetrack in Ventura, apparently worry free as he and other top brass at Kia Motors America Inc. spent a day feting automotive writers. Indeed, the South Korean auto importer's new sales and marketing chief insists that economic woes plaguing the parent company--the entire South Korean auto industry, in fact--have little impact on Irvine-based Kia's operations in the United States.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 15, 1991
A 20-year-old man was shot and wounded Sunday after a traffic dispute turned violent in a shopping center parking lot, police said. Russell Lee Olivarez of Santa Ana was hospitalized in stable condition with a single gunshot wound to the lower left abdomen, Police Sgt. Dwight Moore said. He was fired upon five times with a small-caliber weapon by an assailant in a dark Hyundai automobile about 5:30 p.m., Moore said.