Hyundai to go football crazy with FIFA-themed in-car screens
Raft of wacky in-car upgrades to include Peanut's Charlie Brown hailing a ride in your Hyundai
Hyundai is working on football-themed in-car digital displays, to tap into 2026 World Cup fever.
Enabled by over-the-air updates, the downloads are part of a growing number of digital services rolling out in Hyundai’s Bluelink store. Details are still being worked out, but the Korean giant wants to expand its existing marketing partnership with global football governing body FIFA inside its cars.
No word yet on whether it’ll be one-size-fits-all 2026 World Cup branding or whether England fans could have a red-and-white St George’s Cross tinge to their in-car screens – assuming the team qualifies. These digital tweaks will certainly be more fuel-efficient than football fans plastering their cars in drag-creating flags that hammer the fuel economy but we worry about the residual value if an England-themed Hyundai found its way to a dealer in Scotland, for example.
Football isn’t the only theme Hyundai is considering – a tie-up with licence-holders for cartoon strip Peanuts is also on the cards, meaning Charlie Brown and Snoopy could be hitching a ride in Hyundais soon.
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Are in-car purchases the next big thing?
It’s all part of a new battleground in the automotive value chain: in-car purchases.
Hyundai’s new flagship EV, the Ioniq 9 SUV, has three digital upgrades coming to the UK in August 2025: a version of the Ioniq 5 N’s virtual gearshift operated by the 9’s brake paddles and six new lighting patterns as you approach the car. Both are set to cost around £100. Two alternative infotainment displays, one inspired by nature and the other a retro take referencing the 1975 Hyundai Pony, will be free downloads.
Watch Disney+ or Netflix in your Hyundai
More broadly appealing will be the roll-out of an entertainment package around the turn of 2026: owners will be able to upgrade and watch streaming services such as Disney+ or Netflix while they charge their cars.
In-car payments – already enabled in the USA and Germany – will also come to the UK, around the turn of 2025. The first scheduled service is paying for location-based parking with a couple of infotainment clicks, with the session terminating as the car leaves the parking garage. Expect to see this extended to fuelling your car and paying for road tolls too – once UK service partners have been secured.
Hyundai aims to roll out 2-3 big updates a year, the firm’s director of connected car services Guido Gehlen told Auto Express. The car maker starts with a small sample of cars, then when it’s satisfied the update is trouble-free scales it up over a few months.
Google Places – which adds information such as user ratings, images and opening hours to shops and attractions – has been updated into the navigation system on connected versions of the Kona, Ioniq 5, Santa Fe and Tucson.
The dream is for Hyundais to report potholes
Gehlen’s team has added emergency vehicle alert to connected Hyundais and Kias in the Netherlands.
Every ambulance, police car and fire engine is tracked on a government database, which has been plumbed into the navigation system. As a result, drivers should be better able to avoid that confusion of trying to work out which direction an emergency siren is coming from, to quicker clear a path when necessary.
And the alert system could work the other way, enabling Hyundais to feed back information to the authorities about shocking potholes. “The Netherlands would like camera and suspension data about the quality of streets,” says Gehlen. “It’s more complicated because we have to anonymise the data but we are working on it. You could take the information from one car and share it with the whole fleet.”
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