I find more Porsche 928s, Alfa Romeo Alfettas, Buick Reattas, and Datsun 810s than I do first-gen Hyundai Excels during my travels in high-turnover self-service wrecking yards, in spite of the 1985-89 Excel selling in tremendous quantities in the United States. You saw these things everywhere on the street until about 1992, at which point the import sections of American junkyards became choked with low-mile Excels that crapped out in not-worth-fixing fashion. I believe the first-gen Excel was the worst motor vehicle you could buy new in the United States in the 1980s, and maybe for the entire fourth quarter of the 20th Century. Yes, even worse than the Yugo. Read More >
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Category: Hyundai
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Hyundai ReviewsThe Hyundai Motor Company is the world's 5th largest automaker selling mid-sized sedans, coupes and SUVs like the Sonata, Genesis Coupe and the Santa Fe. The Hyundai logo, a slanted, stylized 'H', is said to be symbolic of two people (the company and customer) shaking hands. Hyundai means "modernity" in Korean. |
In just a few short years, Myanmar has gone from Southeast Asia’s pariah state to the new darling of investors looking for the next emerging market.
Hyundais will be in short supply this coming month. Workers in Korea refused to make them and went on strike in July and August. Hyundai and the unions reached a tentative wage deal today, “ending the second-costliest strike in the firm’s 45-year history,” as Reuters reports.
Anyone can write a world-class review of an interesting car. Something like a McLaren M4-12C or a Ferrari 458 lends itself well to Clarksonian prose, full of overwrought similies and hyperbolic commentary on the driving experience. Writing a great review of an utterly boring, utilitarian car that captures the reader’s attention? Now that takes work.
Hyundai doesn’t get every bit of a car perfect before introducing it. No auto maker does. But Hyundai does pay attention to feedback from reviewers and owners, and often upgrades its cars in response to criticism. Only in its fourth model year, the Genesis Coupe already has had its interior upgraded twice.
New exterior
Last year I recommended the Hyundai Elantra Touring for those who “want a simply designed car that’s easy to see out of, capable of toting a bunch of stuff, solidly constructed, and fun to drive.” A replacement was on the horizon, and I wondered if it would retain the ET’s increasingly uncommon strengths. Well, the 2013 Elantra GT is now here, and it performs well enough to rank above other new compact Hyundais. But what about its predecessor?
“That is how I drive. Flat Out.” So says the infamous, Miata-blocking Koenigsegg/GT2 driver in the trackday community’s Most Favorite Video Ever. As a journeyman instructor and track rat, I encounter fellows like this all the time — but just as often, I see reasonably talented drivers in small-caliber hardware who take a perverse pleasure in holding up equally talented students in Corvettes and the like. When I discuss their behavior with them, they will always say, with a sort of wounded, defensive pride,
“It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast, than it is to drive a fast car slowly.” My response is always the same:
“Yes, but it’s the most fun to drive a fast car quickly, so next time, I need you to point us by before the Climbing Esses.”
The Genesis 2.0t R-Spec has the most power, the lowest lap times, and the most ridiculous name in our little group. It’s the fast car of the group, and it’s fun to drive fast, too. Why’d it finish second?
In our second installment, we take the Scion FR-S to the track, along with the heavier, but more powerful Hyundai Genesis 2.0T and its spiritual antecedent, the Mazda MX-5. Oh, and there are special guests from Japan and America.
Please welcome Jeff Jablansky, our newest guest writer and resident messhugeneh
Attempting to carve into the curves of the Ramon Crater with a machine as dull as a Hyundai Getz is like trying to slice sashimi with a plastic knife. Or performing surgery with knitting needles.
Last week we saw how Great Wall reached Bulgaria with promising results, and this week is the moment you’ve all been eagerly waiting for: the famous World car sales Roundup, June edition! You can check out previous world Roundups here for March 2012 (“Has the Hybrid era started for good?”), here for April 2012 (“Big change coming from India”) and here for May 2012 (“GM and Toyota Etios make headlines”).
World Roundups not your thing? No worries, you can visit 168 countries and territories in my blog, go on, you know you want to!
So in May we talked General Motors and Toyota, this month we talk Ford and Hyundai, with the Focus and Santa Fe now making headlines…
What do you do if you lose market share and can’t stand it anymore? You deliver what the market wants. Hyundai is trying to make up for losses in China with a (so far) China only car that slot between the Elantra and the Sonata, says Reuters. Read More >
Sometimes designers become super stars in the car biz: just ask that dude who made the Ford GT, or the other dude responsible for the Chrysler 300. I am sure both made other vehicles which they truly hated. Perhaps the 300’s designer shares some amount of blame for the last Chrysler Sebring? I am sure that Ital Design’s Giorgetto Giugiaro has the same problem, but Hyundai wrote him a check and he made it happen. Quite honestly, the original Hyundai Excel here in the USA wasn’t a bad car at all. Bad looking, that is.
And honestly, after walking around this example at a historically savvy Hyundai dealer (next to a Lamborghini Dealership that bored me after 20 minutes) I suggest to you, dear reader, that the Excel sold so unbelievably well on both price and design. Because this machine could look much, much worse.
One thing I’ve noticed after decades of prowling high-turnover self-service wrecking yards is the increasing average age of junked Hyundais. The first-gen Excel started showing up in junkyards in large quantities when the cars were about five years old (i.e., the worst car available in North America during the second half of the 20th century), and by the mid-1990s they were all gone. These days, most of the Crusher-bound Hyundais I see are more like 15 years old, about halfway between the average age of junked Chryslers and junked Hondas. The Tiburon has been around since 1997, and this is perhaps the third one I’ve seen in this setting. Read More >
If it weren’t for auto bloggers, the question of a separate Hyundai luxury brand would have been dead and buried long ago. But auto bloggers, with a desperate need to generate news out of thin air, won’t let the story die. 224,000 Google results later, and we finally have a definitive answer.
A gentleman named Louis Bird is suing Hyundai because his 2011 Elantra isn’t getting the claimed 40 mpg that Hyundai’s ads apparently tout. Bird is being supported by a group called Consumer Watchdog, and if that rings a bell, maybe it’s because TTAC has dealt with them a few times in the past regarding Hyundai.
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