“The heart is beating! It’s supposed to beat 100 times a minute. That would be 1,000 times in 10 minutes, right?” This is what elementary school students from Wolhak Elementary in Inje County, Gangwon Province exclaimed as they clasped their hands together and pressed on the mannequin’s chest aboard the ‘Gift Car.’ In their eyes, their resolution to help save lives during emergencies clearly shines through.
The training the children participated in was called ‘Gift Car Heartbeat,’ the 14th season of Hyundai Motor Group’s community outreach campaign, ‘Gift Car,’ where the company sends support vehicles to address a variety of social issues.
14 Years of Giving Back to Society
Hyundai Motor Group’s ‘Gift Car,’ which began in 2010 as an initiative to provide vehicles and messages of support to underprivileged groups, is now in its 14th season. Each season of ‘Gift Car’ has focused on a different social issue and run campaigns to address them. Notably, after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Season 11 campaign provided special blood donation vehicles to replenish the depleted supply of blood, while Seasons 12 and 13 offered aid to struggling small businesses through startup vehicles and assistance with online sales.
Hyundai Motor Group has provided a total of 407 support vehicles over 14 years.
From Cities to Villages: Creating a Safer Society for All
‘Gift Car Heartbeat’ campaign (Season 14) was designed around the theme that ‘from those in cities with millions of residents, to those in villages with only a few dozen people, everyone should have access to life-saving emergency response training.’ This program, run in collaboration with the Korean Red Cross, garnered significant interest by offering CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) and AED (Automated External Defibrillator) training inside vehicles.
‘Gift Car Heartbeat’ comes in two formats: ‘On-Site Emergency Response Training,’ which caters to groups of two or more applicants, and ‘Guest Sessions at Rural Schools,’ targeting small elementary schools in remote and mountainous areas in eight regions across South Korea. The ‘On-Site Emergency Response Training’ drew the most interest, with over 880 submissions to Hyundai Motor Group from applicants nationwide. Welfare institutions such as child welfare centers, senior welfare centers, and nursing homes accounted for the majority of the demand, along with small businesses that lacked access to emergency response training.
A representative from a nursing home wrote in their application, “Residents with disabilities or elderly individuals can suddenly collapse or start to choke while eating. It is imperative that we have the skills to save as many precious lives as possible when these types of everyday emergencies occur.”
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Seeing the Gift Car open up like a robot and then getting to do the training inside made it more fun. The big screen and all the machines they had for emergency training were really cool. I was nervous learning how to use an AED for the first time, but it’s awesome to know I could save a life with it.
A student who participated in the ‘Gift Car Heartbeat’
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I once had a terrifying experience where an elderly person lost consciousness and collapsed. I decided I definitely needed emergency response training to prepare myself for if something like that ever happened again. Out of all the training programs I’ve tried, the ‘Gift Car Heartbeat’ On-Site Emergency Response Training was the most substantial and professional.
Social Worker, Sugyeongjaega Senior Care Center, Daegu, Lee Dong-gyu
‘Gift Car Heartbeat’ Achievements
Number of Trainees
12,025
Number of Sessions
643
Heartbeat Campaign Video Views
Over 52.76million
Gift Car Running for Everyone’s Bright Day
A total of 12,025 people have received professional CPR training through ‘Gift Car Heartbeat.’ Most participants evaluated their CPR skills as having improved through the training. Their confidence score for ‘being able to perform CPR’ rose significantly from 53.5 before training to 77.9 afterward. An elementary student who participated in a ‘Guest Session at Rural Schools’ remarked, “It was harder than I expected, but I felt proud of myself for learning the correct way to do it. Before the training, I was scared of performing CPR, but now I feel confident in my skills.”
The 12 ‘Gift Car Heartbeat’ vehicles, which have been modified by removing the seats and installing training TVs and other equipment to facilitate on-board education, were donated to the Korean Red Cross and will continue to be used for emergency response training. For the past 14 years, ‘Gift Car’ has been addressing social issues through vehicular support. A new season is planned for 2025, gifting yet another initiative to different corners of society.
