Look, I’m not saying rose gold will mark the final evolution in jewelry fashion, or fashion in general. I’m not saying kids won’t easily be able to tell my age or preferred era of style upon seeing my rose gold wedding ring in 30 years, like I do now with rectangularlycut diamonds encased in thick walls of yellow gold. I’m not saying rose gold is forever. But rose gold is now, and it appears to be available on the Hyundai Nexo.
The Hyundai Nexo is a hydrogen fuel-cell crossover we don’t talk about a lot, mainly because it’s currently only available in California. It looks like a generic crossover from the outside, with cladding all around its base and a feeling that the designers tried to go for a minimalistic look but didn’t get too daring with it, and is priced around $60,000. Going green isn’t cheap, you know.
But those trivial thoughts evaporate when you open the configurator, seeing one of the four paint options: “copper metallic,” Hyundai calls it.
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Yeah, right. Sure. Put a penny next to that thing and tell me, in good faith, that it’s “copper.” You can’t.
That is because, friends, this crossover appears to be rose gold. The press photos from Hyundai look rose gold. The configurator photos look rose gold. The single Autotrader listing with a photo of the vehicle in this color looks to have more of a yellow tint thanks to the atrocious lighting it’s in, but that’s because almost all dealer advertisement photos appear to be taken by someone who has never operated a phone camera or basic editing tool in their life.
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“Perhaps it is just the lighting,” I told my coworkers in our Slack chat. “But that sure looks like rose gold to me.”
“Omg!” Kristen Lee responded. “IS IT?”
She then got into the specifics—proposing, perhaps, that this is “champagne.” But “champagne” is reserved for champagne Lexus SUVs, which are not a thing to brag about and which Jalopnik Editor-in-Chief Patrick George championed a short-lived section mocking on DriveTribe. RIP.
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“This is rosier champagne,” Kristen said. “A blush, if you will.”
That meets my requirements for rose gold, and I’m sure, if it could talk, that my rose-colored champagne bottle in the kitchen would agree.
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Of course, I can’t put out the final verdict, as I’ve never seen the Nexo in person because it’s in California and I am not. The inclination here, though, is that it is rose gold—which is both objectively the best invention of human kind and a far under-appreciated color in the automotive industry that should be on every car, ever. Give me a rose-gold Ford Focus RS, or a rose-gold Lotus Elise. Give me everything in rose gold. Paint the streets with it. It will match my phone case and my excessively reflective sunglasses. It will match my soul.
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I reached out to Hyundai about the paint color, asking whether it looks as rose gold in person as it does in photos and whether, perhaps, the Nexo’s paint was somewhat inspired by the only color anything should ever be. (In the online configurator, the Nexo is the only U.S. vehicle available in the color.) Hyundai has yet to respond, probably because its “copper metallic” hoax has been found out, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Either way, we all know the truth.
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