Car of the Week: Hyundai’s crossover Kona is all grown up

BY BRIAN BYRNE

AS a brand, Hyundai is the fifth-biggest car company in the world by units sold. But that’s not the whole picture. Put Hyundai and its sister Kia brand together and combined they are in second place with 6.8m cars sold in 2022 behind the top maker Toyota’s 10.5m.

That might not seem to have much relevance for an Irish local review of the new generation Kona. But it does show the automotive muscle this South Korea carmaker has developed in a relatively short number of years. Particularly in the crossover and SUV spaces. Today it has, along with its Santa Fe large SUV, an Irish best seller in the compact Tucson, and Hyundai’s own second-best selling model here, the B-segment Kona crossover. The new generation Kona has the potential to build the brand’s strong performance here quite a distance higher.

The new Kona has grown. Longer, wider and taller than its predecessor, it comes with a longer wheelbase also and a substantially bigger boot capacity. The larger boot is likely to be much appreciated by the family buyer cohort. So will the style smarts. From a fairly run of the mill crossover design, the new Kona’s designers have given it much more visual impact. Though sitting lower to the ground than its predecessor, this one looks serious business. The black and N-Line trimmings on my review car inject even more styling ‘wow’.

The bonnet is high, with a streamlined but purposeful look that emphasises the Hyundai logo sitting on the curve above a full-width thin LED strip ... that last is only on the N-Line, by the way, but certainly adds something to the overall effect. If the whole front looks rather EV, that’s because the designers worked that version up first, adapting it later for the petrol and hybrid versions. 

The headlights styling is eye-catching, to say the least, making the most of the amazing flexibility that LED technology allows. Sculpting along the profile of the car adds further strength to the overall aesthetic, and the very clean rear and tailgate treatment was buzzed up in my review car with N-Line bumper and tailpipe elements. The typography of the Kona name across the tailgate is exceptionally distinctive.

N-Line also spiced up an already punchy interior design with thin red detailing, and red stitching on the upholstery. The driver feels well looked after with the highly-integrated information displays. And the use of proper buttons, switches and knobs for the climate and volume controls is both welcome and suggests to me that carmakers are finally hearing the message about overreliance on touchscreens.

The car feels roomy for those up front, and is so in practice for people in the back, providing virtually C-segment space in a B-segment car. I was very happy with my headroom getting into and exiting the car – regular readers will know I’m often challenged here.

The new Kona so far comes with two powertrain options: 120hp 1.0 petrol with manual gearbox and 140hp 1.6 petrol-hybrid with automatic — both are 6-speed. The N-Line review car only comes in petrol-manual, which was another change from the majority automatics I seem to have been driving this year. Though the shift-prompts, which I never go with anyway, indicated changing that would keep things quiet as well as optimise economy, the engine characteristics encouraged higher revving through the gears. 

That did bring in some noise, but not unpleasantly so. At highway speeds in cruise mode the Kona hums along quite peacefully. The manual shifts are clean and precise.

I’ve briefly driven the hybrid, and like how it goes. There will be a fully electric new Kona in October. Hyundai Ireland expects that two-thirds of sales will be hybrid.

The car has a full set of driver assists, though as in the Ioniq 6 I reviewed recently, there’s a surfeit of beeps and bongs associated with them. Every time you start the car it takes ten swipe-or-tap actions on the screen to turn the most irritating of them off. 

Beyond that, this is yet another excellent addition to a portfolio of models that, taken all together, show how to go from being a maker of cheap and not always cheerful cars to being a highly respected quality brand.