Now an increasingly rare sight, this car once was the best-selling car to come out of the developing world.

This is an early 1990s example, after the facelift for the second-generation Excel. Its trim level is GLSi - denoting fuel injection, a feature that was included with upper-range domestic Excels and standard on all North American Excels 1990 and later.

This car is so old that its license plate is of the older "Jurisdiction 1 x 2345" format rather than the later "Jurisdiction 12 x 3456," with the vehicle class indicator being just one digit; this format was used from 1973 through the mid-1990s, by which time there were so many automobiles in South Korea that authorities were running out of unused combinations to assign to new cars.

This generation, chassis code X2, did poorly in export markets, partly due to its atrocious engineering and build quality. It simply could never replicate the equally atrocious predecessor X1's runaway success in the US in particular, partly because South Korean labor costs had risen dramatically in the wake of the 1987 democracy reforms and the legalization of labor unions. Eventually Hyundai had to fight with quality rather than price; starting with the next subcompact, the Accent (chassis code X3), Hyundai did just that and slowly won its US market share back.