Some mental adjustment may be required to make room for this perception. You must set aside all prejudice. Forget everything you think you know about Hyundai and Korea. And don’t concern yourself with the fact that you haven’t got a clue how to pronounce the name.
Now you may be in a frame of mind to see that, for price, for quality, for comfort, for reliability, for after-sales backup, the i30 is not just a contender: it’s an obvious front-runner. You will have noticed the absence of the word “design” in that list. We’ll come back to that.
Since the turn of the millennium, the Korean Hyundai-Kia conglomerate has been taking aim at Europe with a ferocious concentration. To crack the most snootily discerning car market in the world, they have built vast and costly manufacturing plants in central Europe. There they have applied the highest Asian methods and standards of work while employing many of the European industry’s best executives to market their products.
The outcome has been a range of cars that demand to be included in any customer’s careful calculations. The Hyundai i30 is merely the latest and the best. More and better will follow. We can be sure of that.
In fact, one of them will be along in a trice. The new Kia Cee’d – which shares most of its underpinnings with the Hyundai i30 – will be with us this summer, will carry Kia’s seven-year warranty (compared with Hyundai’s five) and will probably be cheaper. For the time being, however, here is the i30 and tremendously good it is.
Previous i30s have been created chiefly to stress their engineering strengths – their dependability, their durability and their sound driving dynamics. The new model adds to those virtues with a battery of unexpected sensual pleasures and some startling figures for fuel economy.
The new i30’s body is more purposeful, less bland from every angle. Its powerful stance and stubby nose are distinctively individual while deserving favourable comparison with the Golfs, Focuses and Astras in this division. You won’t stand out for dreariness in this i30.
Inside, the accommodation is stylish, spacious and comfortable, with flexible possibilities for luggage afforded by the fold-flat seats. Even more impressive is the level of standard equipment. The £19,295 price for the 1.6 Blue Drive version I drove included a list of standard equipment nearly a page long with some fitments like air-conditioning, parking sensors and electronic stability programme that cost hundreds, even thousands of pounds on European competitors.
Best of all, that version of the i30 achieves such low CO² figures that it gets into VED Band A for which no road tax is payable and is exempt from London congestion charging. And, with stop-start technology, its overall fuel consumption is by far the lowest in its class.
So in circles where they talk about cutting to the chase and the bottom line, this i30 must be what they call a no-brainer.
