Hyundai i10 2014 Review

Hyundai i10 2014

The light car segment, or A segment in Europe, has never been a gold mine for car companies in Australia, nor their dealers. That’s largely because most of the light cars sold here weren’t all that good and margins were so low that dealers inevitably tried to push people up to the B segment.

Volkswagen changed the way people think about light cars with the current Polo, then changed it again with the sub-light Up!. With the Polo, small cars didn’t have to feel or drive like cheap cars. Now Hyundai’s Australian arm is deep in discussion about turning it on its ear again.

Its i10, designed in Germany and built in Turkey, was launched late last year in Europe and Hyundai’s Australian team wants to bring it here. They don’t have that much wriggle room, because the larger i20 is a $14,990 drive-away proposition nationwide, but you get the feeling the five-door i10 wouldn’t necessarily have to sell on price alone.

In Europe, the highest spec i10 flits around with ridiculous standard gear like heated leather seats, a heated leather steering wheel, climate control, a smart key, steering-wheel-mounted cruise control and even an adjustable speed limiter. Should the coin toss fall the right way and a fleet of i10s do the 1915 campaign in reverse, most of that fruit won’t make the boat, but even the European mid-spec car carries a height-adjustable driver’s seat, remote locking and power windows.

It still gives you an idea of how seriously Hyundai is taking the fight in Europe, though.

Europe’s i10 charge is lead by a three-cylinder petrol motor, but there’s bugger-all chance of that ever seeing Australian shores. Instead, the car Hyundai is talking about is the 1.25-litre, four-cylinder version, which comes complete with higher-end stuff like a long-life timing chain, variable valve timing and a cast aluminium engine block.

Then there are the electronic safety nets, which include ABS braking (with ventilated front discs), stability control, vehicle stability management, brake-force distribution and even tyre pressure monitoring. Should that fail to keep the panels straight, there are six airbags, including full-length curtain side bags.

All of this is crammed into a package that is 3665mm long, 1660mm high and only 1500mm high, even though its interior-space ambitions make it seem taller in pictures. There’s a 2385mm wheelbase, too, all crammed into a body that looks tautly drawn and is built around so much high-tensile steel that it’s 27 per cent stiffer than its predecessor.

Noise was a bugbear on the old car and the European engineering team went berserk hunting it down. Now the little gadget wears a triple-layer dashboard bulkhead, double rubber door seal strips and a lot more sound deadening, even though all of this hasn’t pushed it beyond 941kg.

That’s a good thing, because the little Kappa family engine squeezes out 64kW of power at 6000rpm and 120Nm of torque at 4000rpm. No turbos to be found here, so it generates all of this via its limited capacity, a relatively long stroke and its variable valve timing and clever software.

Still, it’s not going to win any races, with Hyundai claiming the i10 with the five-speed manual will hit 100km/h in 12.3 seconds (the four-speed auto is 1.5 seconds slower) and has a top speed of 171km/h. There were those among us (not me, obviously) who took that as a challenge and comfortably saw more than 185km/h recorded on their satellite navigation units.

It’s not especially economical, with a combined 4.9 litres/100km figure on the NEDC and it emits 114 grams of CO2/km, but you have to spend on turbo motors or diesels to better it at this end of the market.

The thing we found with the i10 was that it was quite stupidly comfortable, instantly composed and integrated all of its parts just like a proper big car.

It starts when you approach it and notice that its LED front lights aren’t added on, but integrated into the neat design of the nose. Then the interior reveals a level of material quality and a level of planned thinking that it was once incapable of.

The plastics are close to the top shelf stuff, and they’re designed to be put together in such a way that they have almost no chance of rubbing together annoyingly even though the shutlines and gaps are credit-card tight.

The only real exception – and we’re nit-picking – is that the steering wheel on the top-spec cars carries 15 buttons, and that’s just at the front. It’s so busy that it’s easy to forget its actual job is to point the car at things. Or away from them.

The seats are instantly comfortable, the driving position just works easily and the seat is high enough to give clear visibility to anyone sitting in it. It doesn’t stop there, because the i10 can swallow one-litre drink bottles in each of its front doors (and 0.6-litre bottles in the rear), yet still has a pair of cupholders ahead of the gearshift. Yep, it’s a car for (soft) drinkers, but it highlights just how hard Hyundai tried with this thing.

The engine is quiet when it fires on its start button (twist keys are for suckers) and the gearbox, with carbon-fibre coatings on its synchromesh rings for added durability, slots in with the perfect combination of weight and accuracy.

The pedals might be a fraction light, and that’s just about the biggest criticism we can level at the powertrain (and even that might have had as much to do with cold-weather boots). It’s flexible for an engine this size, it works hard when you want it to and it doesn’t intrude with either noise or vibrations.

That gearbox has accurate throws and clean shifts and it all conspires to make the driver seem like a silk-shifting god to any passengers in the car.

Then there’s the ride and handling package. With a combination of a strut front end, a torsion beam rear end and electric power steering (with a 9.56-metre turning circle) the i10 shouldn’t feel as good as it does. It has that elusive goal lacking in most baby cars – composure.

You can wring its neck and make it dance and slide, but you won’t make it feel uncivilised or incoherent. You won’t get the back and the front working at cross-purposes. You won’t make it do anything that feels like it can’t be easily brought back under control.

It rides with a stupid level of composure, it handles with a stupid level of composure and the powertrain has a stupid level of composure.

With 252 litres of luggage space expanding to 1046 when you drop the 60:40 split-fold rear seats, with a 920mm rear hatch width and with reasonable rear seating for kids, composure is what it’s going to take Hyundai’s management team to not be suckered in to asking more money for this car than their brand can bear in the Australian market.

Because on merit alone, it’s as good as anything out there this small and could mount a credible argument for being the best in its segment.

2014 Hyundai i20 pricing and specifications:
Price: TBA
Engine: 1.25-litre four-cylinder petrol
Output: 64kW/120Nm
Transmission: five-speed manual
Fuel: 4.9L/100km (combined)
CO2: 114g/km (combined)
Safety Rating: Five-star NCAP

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