With festivities in full swing in the Big Apple, it’s easy to forget that there’s more than one motor show going on right now. On the Korean peninsula, Seoul is hosting its annual show, with Hyundai showing the HND-9 Concept in its home market.
Considering it’s Friday, and none of us want to do actual work, this makes today’s list a perfect time sink. We’ve corralled our most popular POV test drives, and have assembled them in one place. There’s roughly an hour’s worth of video here, with everything from affordable rear-drive coupes, to full-bore sports cars, to a pair of very powerful muscle cars. There are few better ways to spend an hour of your day then watching these videos (make sure you have headphones!).
Hyundai built a hot hatch. It’s called the Veloster Turbo, and it has 3.5 doors and a 201-horsepower, turbocharged four-cylinder under the hood. Now, bitter rival/sister company Kia has done its take on the hot hatch, offering up a stylish, five-door Forte with the same 201-horsepower engine. Verdict? Well, the Forte wins on looks.
If you’re a chauffer and your boss wants an Alpina, be happy. It is stupendously fast, this. With 540 horsepower and 538 pound-feet of torque, the Alpina is every bit the sports sedan it purports to be. Power is up from 445 horsepower and 480 pound-feet of torque over the standard 750i/Li.
Our first reaction? It looks like it was styled by an angry man with a samurai sword. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s exactly the sort of aggressive design we’ve been waiting for from Lexus, and there’s perhaps no more important of a vehicle for it to appear on than one that’s meant to do battle with the Cadillac ATS and BMW 3-Series.
The 2013 North American International Auto Show press days are just a week away, which means it’s high time we start seeing some teasers. In this case, Hyundai has given the obligatory peak at what it’s calling the HCD-14 Concept. Sexy name.
Our 2013 Hyundai Santa Fe Sport was powered by a 2.4-liter. Its 190 horsepower peaks at 6300 rpm, with 181 pound-feet of torque available at 4250 rpm. It’s not particularly fast, but It’s lively enough and far from sluggish. Power comes on smoothly as you feed in input to the right pedal, and there’s no problems with jerky driving. This Santa Fe would be a great car for driving guest or clients to dinner and around town for that reason. The brakes are firm, too, but are still easy to modulate and use smoothly.
Kia has unveiled a significantly updated version of its four-door Forte at the LA Auto Show. The new compact will do battle with the likes of the Ford Focus, Hyundai Elantra, Honda Civic, and Chevrolet Cruze.
The upshot of the Sentra’s cabin is mainly one of space. There’s an absolute surplus of room. With 37.4 inches of rear legroom, the compact Sentra actually bests the mid-size Altima sedan. It also packs more space for backseat passengers than a host of competitors (Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Mazda3, Chevy Cruze, Ford Focus, and Hyundai Elantra). The Sentra isn’t just extra legroom, but space in general. With 95.9 cubic feet of interior volume and 15.1 cubic feet of cargo volume, the Sentra crams a huge amount of interior space onto a compact platform.
HyundaiBlog is reporting that the next generation Hyundai Genesis Coupe and Genesis sedan could feature a turbocharged version of the company’s current 3.8-liter V-6 engine.
We take you on a visual tour and POV Test Drive in the 2013 Hyundai Elantra Coupe SE.
Most concept cars—especially the ones occupying the SEMA showfloor every year—are so outlandish it’s almost guaranteed they will never see production. And then there are concept vehicles like Hyundai’s Velocity Concept that make us giggle like a schoolgirl. The Velocity concept is wild enough to taunt the imagination, but realistic enough that spotting one on the street or the track someday could be a real possibility.
This month, we take three turbo sprites—the Fiat 500 Abarth, Hyundai Veloster Turbo, and Mini Cooper S Coupe—and pit them against one another to determine our favorite. Plus, we pack a bunch of other automotive content in this issue.
We take the new 2013 Hyundai Elantra GT around the block in our latest POV Test Drive.
We recently had some seat time in the Chevrolet Equinox. While it’s not the newest of the CUV pack, Chevrolet has fit it with a 3.6-liter V-6 for 2013, giving it more than enough gusto to compete with the Hyundai Santa Fes and Ford Escapes of the world.
Until now, Chevy only offered its Malibu as a mild-hybrid Eco and a rather tepid 2.5-liter four-pot. The arrival of the 2.0T delivers a healthy power boost to the Bowtie’s bread-and-butter sedan.
Part of what’s made Hyundai so successful over the past few years isn’t that its cars are spectacular to drive; it’s that they look good, feel upscale, and represent a value (a value that is much different than the one the brand represented for the first 15 or so years of its US existence). The 2013 Santa Fe Sport is no exception.
This month in Winding Road, we pit the radical Hyundai Genesis Coupe 2.0T R-Spec against the new Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ in a sport coupe showdown. Plus, we pack a bunch of other automotive content in this issue.
This week we test the all new 2013 Ford Escape SE. In this video we take you on a brief visual tour and then hop in the driver’s seat for a “virtual test drive.”