It looked kind of like this only more depressing in person:
The quick summary: Why the Hell does everyone who owns one of these love it so much?!
The details:
Styling
-12 out of 10.
This is a hideous, terrible-looking car. Like all current Hyundais, it has aged very poorly because it's overstyled and underthought. Crease, curves, and pointlessness everywhere. It's just ugly. There is nothing remotely attractive about it. It's not a badly executed good design or a well executed bad design. It's just bad. It looks cheap, it looks aged already, and it hurts my eyes.
Interior
3 out of 10.
The interior is an amalgam of cheap, trying too hard, and crappy ergonomics. I am not sure what species of creature the car is designed to carry, but it certainly isn't humans.
Despite being a Korean car, the ergonomics remind me most of German cars. It's apparently designed for people with short legs and long arms, like some kind of inverse T-rex. As with the Mercedes Benz C-class, if I get the seat adjusted anywhere near comfortably, the steering wheel is in a different time zone. And while the steering wheel was (mercifully) tilt AND telescope adjustable, the range of adjust was so miniscule as to render it almost pointless. The lowest tilt position in the Elantra was about on par with the highest tilt position in my LS8. I like the wheel down low, and this car just wouldn't do it. The telescope adjust also didn't let me get the wheel anywhere near far enough toward me to keep my legs comfortably extended. So I ended up with the seat too far forward. My arms still got tired because the wheel was way too high.
Compounding these problems is the ridiculous placement of the center arm-rest, which is much too low and too far aft to be of any use while your hand is on the steering wheel. YOu can use the arm rest along with the also too-low gearshift lever to rest your arm, but there's no support for your right arm while steering. Very, very bad design.
The seats were also terrible. The headrests are raked so far forward that I was not able to lean back against the seat without my neck being pushed forward significantly. So instead of getting good posture and good lumbar support from the half-decent seatback, I ended up having to recline the seat like a gangsta and put all the pressure on my headrest.
The dead pedal is in an awkward spot, since it's basically just a plastic pad glued onto the wheel-arch where it intrudes to the cabin.
Meanwhile, the gauge cluster has the gauges sunk so far down stupid motorcycle-style barrels that, even though visibility of the gauge faces was good, I felt like I was using a door peephole to look at them. It felt awkward and weird, and the gauge barrels add nothing functional.
The steering wheel did not have on-wheel audio controls. Is this 1995? My cousin's base-model 2012 Focus has audio controls on the steering wheel for Hell's sake.
It was impossible for me to swing the sun visor around to the door window position without cracking myself in the head.
Visibilty rearward was terrible. The car's a** rivals Mt. Everest as the highest point on the Earth, and the godawful melted-butter styling means the c-pillars are simultaneously low-profile and all-obstructing. The ultra-formal, thick, tall, livery-style c-pillars of the LS8 cover 5 times the surface area but obstruct 10 times less of the view.
Visibility forward was phenomenal, since the nose drops off more sharply than my enthusiasm at a Microsoft press conference.
Features and extras
-1 out of 10
You have to HAVE some features or extras to score points here. This car had manual climate control, a radio, a CD player, some 12v sockets, and cruise control. That's pretty much it.
But not being able to EARN points doesn't mean being exempt from LOSING points. The HVAC controls were more opaque than I've ever seen, and I've dealt with the unfathomablely insane auto climate control from the first-gen Q45. The blower has 4 speeds and the lowest one is already too high. The car had the loudest HVAC blower I have ever heard in any car. Meanwhile, changing the temp knob might have had some kind of effect, but I wasn't able to distinguish it. There's also a "Max AC" button above the dual control knobs, but what it did was as much a mystery to me as the meaning of life. The car was also determined to use recirc whenever possible, despite most of the drive occurring through high-altitude, low temp mountain passes where outside temp was colder than inside temp.
Powertrain
Dead squirrel out of 10
This was genuinely, absolutely, uniquivocally the most terrifyingly gutless car I have EVER driven in my life. And I used to own an HT4100 powered DeVille.
I spent a lot of time wondering just how the @#$% I was supposed to make a right turn into traffic in this car. It wasn't "wait a bit for a bigger opening." It was "I am NEVER going to be able to merge."
The engine makes NO USABLE POWER below 6000rpm, and it redlines at 7k. You HAVE TO floor the accelerator to increase speed, and the economy-tuned transmission is always reluctant to drop enough gears for even that to be useful once you're in motion.
Hyundai's website says the base 1.8 makes 145 hp at 6500 rpm, but I never felt anywhere near that much power.
The 1.8 liter four also makes the most intensely unpleasant sound since Axel Rose. It is LOUD, harsh, crude, and thoroughly unpleasant in every sense. You feel it, you hear it, and you wish it would find a hole to die in so the noise will just maybe, mercifully, stop forever. It drones at cruise speed, it flatulates and rasps under throttle, and it buzzes harshly at idle. It's ridiculously loud, as though the exhaust were terminated into the cabin itself. And after driving it for the first 100 miles or so I started to wish maybe that were the case, since at least if I passed out from Carbon Monoxide poisoning I'd be spared the earbleeding soundtrack.
The 6 speed auto keeps cruise speeds low, but since power only lives above 6500rpm, regulating speed to any sane degree is impossible without cruise control. Any change in road grade means dropping at least one gear and an earful of blissful grinding thrashing scream.
The turning radius was impressive, and steering was tight on-center with a well-suited speed ratio. But it was numb and seriously over-assisted.
Brakes bit hard, which was nice, but they bit a little too hard a little too soon, making smooth stops difficult.
Fuel economy was embarrassing. All that unpower and all those gears equalling super-low 80mph cruise RPM returned a mere 35mpg round-trip. Considering the fact that my V8 LS will manage 29mpg on the same trip while making infinitely more usable power and with one less gear, I would say there's some math that simply doesn'tadd up. 50% power decrease for a 17% economy increase? No, thanks. I visited gas stations no less frequently in the Elantra than I am used to in my LS8 on the same drive. I did get to put 85-octane into the little whoopie cushion on wheels, but that's the only upside.
The transmission has a manumatic mode, which is nice for keeping the revs where the power is. Unfortunately the trans also reacts to redline by upshifting, and since redline and usable power share the same bed here, you still end up fighting for grunt even in manual mode.
Handling
3 out of 10
Granted, this was a rental car on the cheapest hankooks imaginable, but it still handled about as well as I play baseball. The body rolled more than my '84 DeVille, although it didn't offer the DeVille's bonus of a fuel gauge that doubles as an attitude indicator during turns. Partly because the Elantra has a pointlessly digital fuel gauge (all gauges aside from speedo and tach are digital here). Obnoxiously, that body roll was somehow mystically coupled to a tremendously harsh ride around town. Neither Ogden UT where I was visiting nor Idaho where I departed from are famous for well-groomed roads, and this Elantra made sure my back experienced every imperfection, despite riding on 55-section tires.
I know I'm not a small-car guy, and I know I've been spoiled by years of driving big V8 luxury sedans, but this car is just intolerable. I know several people who own and love them, and I am now making a concerned effort at discovering what drugs they are using. This car does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING well, scores of things poorly, and has no interesting character quirks. It's pure subparity in automotive form. It's uncomfortable, unpleasant-sounding, not economical, ugly, and cheap-feeling. If Enterprise offers me an Elantra for my next trip, I will decline and walk the 240 miles each way. I cannot fathom test driving one and subsequently deciding to purchase one for actual currency.
Overall score:
I don't even out of GTFO.
Don't ever drive one of these. You will be a happier person for life.
