2015 Hyundai Sonata long-term test: Part II

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/01/2015 (3945 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For one week, I had both the long-term Hyundai Sonata and an Acura TLX.

Now, I don’t want to come off discrediting the TLX. It’s a great car and if you’re in that snack bracket and looking for a sport sedan, I’d heartily recommend it.

But if you’re in that segment we like to call the middle class, have some scratch to spend on a new car but aren’t sure about the price jump to the TLX, I’d have a hard time convincing you to jump from, say, this Hyundai.

Sure, some of the details on the Hyundai – steering wheel, razor-sharp handling and leather, to name a few – might not quite be at the level of a luxury brand. But they’re close. Darn close.

On the race track, I’ll take a TLX, thank you. But on the highways and byways of life, I can find little fault with the handling of the Sonata. It corners precisely through turns and the mapping of the accelerator system and the power of the engine allow you to pour on the power smoothly and quickly on exits. It is predictable. It is tossable. It responds just as it should to throttle steering (using the shift in weight from applying or letting up on the gas pedal to help with turns).

The Sonata as tested sits at $32,999. To get into the TLX I tested, it’s $47,490. At lower price levels of the TLX (it starts at $34,990), the value proposition is a little closer.

The leather in our Sonata Limited isn’t exactly what you’d call supple, the way you might sink into a King Ranch F-150 or Laramie Bighorn Ram 1500. But it is durable, and not uncomfortable the way Korean cars did leather at one time in their history.

And as we delve into the depths of a Winnipeg winter (the stretch of -34 C was most telling), we’re finding the heated seats and heated steering wheel are heaven-sent. At one point, we drove a dealer loaner for a couple of days (more on that later). It was a Sonata, but it was not a Limited. Which means it comes with standard heated seats (front), but no leather. The cloth seats, which don’t conduct cold as effectively as leather, actually feel warmer when you get in and seem to warm up more quickly from the seat heaters.

Forgoing the Limited means forgoing automatic dual-zone climate control, navigation, electronic parking brake, heated rear seats and the heated steering wheel. But it would be good value, all the same.

As for trunk space, it will surprise you. It did us. There’s more volume there than you’d expect from looking at the car outside. It swallowed the hockey bags of three 14-year-olds and still left room for four in the cab. No seats were folded in the making of this journey home from practice, and there was plenty of room in the cab for the hockey sticks and the four people.

As for that loaner, in early January, the check-engine light came on and the car appeared to go into ‘safe’ mode, with reduced power. The dealer traced it to a bad oil seal in the continuously variable valve timing unit. It’s a simple repair, requiring very little time in the shop. It doesn’t require a tear-down of the valvetrain, suggesting thoughtful placement of service items in the valve head.

The problem is so rare, the part had to come from Korea. The dealer and Hyundai Canada said they had not seen this in the history of the current Sonata.

The fuel economy, as expected, has taken a tumble during the cold weather, now sitting at an average of about 12 l/100km. Stiff moving pieces, tire slippage and warming time all contribute to fuel economy going south in winter. As well, we haven’t had the same amount of highway travel as we did in the fall, which would drive the average down, as well.

The Michelin X-Ice2 winter tires went on in October and have been excellent. The sure-footedness of the tires combined with the predictable handling of the car make it quite fun to drive in winter.