Under grey South Korean skies, on a field-flanked road near the Namyang R&D facility, a test mule in heavy cladding pulls out a little way ahead of us and trundles off.
Back in Europe, on the outskirts of Stuttgart or Turin, I suspect my companion and I would be able to deduce pretty quickly what might be lurking under the fabric. But out here? Totally clueless.
The head-spinning scope of Hyundai Motor Group's product rollout means that here, on home ground, it could be anything.
Including, perhaps, an as yet unreleased Kia GT model. The ranks of this young performance sub-brand have swelled at an astonishing rate.
In a little over a decade since the Proceed GT arrived to nothing even close to a fanfare, the junior partner in the Hyundai-Kia axis has already given us 10 stand-alone derivatives and is getting stuck into the new PV5 minivan as you read this.
It took Volkswagen 42 years to reach that figure with GTI, and BMW needed 25 years with M, but platform-sharing and electrification have irreversibly reshaped the game.
Back at Namyang, where 14,000 HMG employees congregate every day, we briefly sit down with R&D boss Manfred Harrer to discover what we can expect of the GT project and how it will exist as a more demure understudy to the increasingly wild-and wacky-efforts of the Hyundai N sister division.
The more divisive elements of cars such as the Ioniq 5 N-piped-in exhaust burble and synthetic gearshifts - are an interesting place to start. Are they the future?
"We see these technologies as an amplifier, not a substitute, for the driving experience," says the man who, for the pleasure of it, completed a PhD on steering feel at the University of Bath.
Are his words a subtle dig, distancing Kia's more understated GT philosophy from N-style gimmicks? Perhaps. While Kia has capitulated and now offers its own 'Virtual Gear Shift' (VGS) in every GT model, the cars have softer, more authentic, more everyday personalities than those from N.
Harrer describes the character and degree of performance offered by the new EV3 and EV4 GTs as something owners can "naturally enjoy" day to day. Usability, then.
