Most places look like somewhere else. Erase the inky bursts of Korean pine, and the road northeast from Incheon to Seoul could be one of the wide asphalt ribbons that snakes its way through the German Eifel, framed by low dark mountains and hung with fog. The flat light and dun-colored hills that fill the windows during a midwinter climb into PyeongChang could be mistaken, at a glance, for central California. More than proportion or terrain, it's the traffic that identifies a South Korean highway—a colorless arterial flow of black and white and gray Hyundais and Kias, and very little otherwise, everywhere you go.

Two years ago, Hyundai Motor Company outsold BMW, Daimler, and Mazda combined. In 2017 the Company—which includes Kia, Korea's second-largest car manufacturer when it was purchased in 1998, and Genesis Motors, Hyundai's luxury-vehicle division until 2015 that has since become a standalone marque—missed its global sales target by one million vehicles. That dropped Hyundai from the world's third-largest automaker to fifth, behind Renault-Nissan (newly gargantuan thanks to the ingestion of Mitsubishi), Volkswagen Group, Toyota, and General Motors. But the company's reach remains impressive: despite its worst sales year since 2012, the company last year shipped 7.25 million cars to over 160 countries. The Hyundai Motor Company is just one part of an exponentially larger chaebol—a family-run conglomerate—called Hyundai Motor Group, which owns or controls interests in the steel, insurance, heavy machinery, finance, construction, engineering, mining, and even sports management industries; it is the second-largest chaebol in South Korea, behind Samsung, and reports an annual revenue in excess of 200 billion dollars. When Hyundai Motor Group makes a decision about its cars, from preferred tire brand to the market viability of hydrogen-powered electric vehicles, it becomes the de facto choice of the South Korean automotive industry.

In late February, Hyundai hosted a grueling three-day event (closer to six days when including travel from the U.S.) to launch a pair of crossovers: the updated 2018 Santa Fe and the all-new Nexo, a next-generation fuel-cell electric vehicle that follows the Santa Fe Tuscon FCEV, which in the U.S. was available only as a California lease. The itinerary included visits to Hyundai's Motorstudio Goyang, a 690,000 square-foot exhibition space and automotive theme park; to Olympic Village, in PyeongChang, for a demonstration of Level 4 self-driving technology in a prototype Nexo; and two distinct press drives, on separate days starting in different parts of the country, of several hours each.

2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics

The only way to describe the full Korean press-trip experience is to note that it is nearly identical to the Japanese version, which is to say an extremely polite death march: 14 hour days scheduled down to 15 minute increments; transferring daily between cars, buses, and trains; and changing hotels nightly. Journalists are fed often and well, and are alternatively fussed over and transported like freight, all while being randomly captured by a stealth cadre of photographers who materialize to document moments like stepping from a bus, feigning interest in a lengthy PowerPoint presentation, or chewing a piece of steak. The experience creates the disorienting feeling that you've become a celebrity's pet, mostly cared for by a team of handlers.

The whole show serves as a highly-choreographed form of brand proselytizing: to Hyundai or Toyota's or Subaru's thinking, fully understanding any car is only possible by first comprehending the corporate culture that created it. It's also worth noting the subtext to these types of tours, which impresses upon the observer the absolute precision necessary to execute such an enormous logistical lift—out-German-ing the Germans, as it were.

A good example was the drive-by attendance of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, which lasted exactly 90 minutes. (The full itinerary for that day, which also included a bus ride, a train ride, a surprisingly funny presentation on Hyundai's rail division during said train ride, and a hotel transfer, was listed on page eight of the 18-page trip handbook which was received by email several days prior.)

I was told by a Hyundai representative that the Olympics were not on the original itinerary, but as the Games were underway in PyeongChang, South Korea's preeminent carmaker ultimately felt duty-bound to share in the national celebration. (In a sly bit of corporate judo, Japanese rival Toyota maintained official automotive sponsorship rights for the 2018 Winter Games thanks to an exclusive 10-year deal, worth a reported $835 million, signed in 2015.) This required the guiding of nearly 70 American, Canadian, New Zealander, and various European journalists into vast rows of stadium seating arranged on a shallow valley floor. An immense lip of manmade snow towered in the near distance; higher still, 160 feet off the ground, a small hut perched atop the ramp, marking the start of the in-run for Men's Big Air snowboarding. A slow procession of tiny men dropped in from on high, picked up speed, and disappeared briefly from view before a colorful little astronaut launched overhead, spinning and flipping in the air like a thrown propeller before touching down into a smooth glide. One would occasionally miss the landing and shovel himself into hard powder, the flat slap and rough scrubbing of abraded nylon echoing off the mountain.