Riding and driving the 2011 Hyundai Elantra

MANILA, Philippines - A week ago, when asked during the press conference at the Walkerhill Hotel in South Korea, if Hyundai sought to be the number one car company in the world, their unanimously clever answer from the panel was that they wanted their products to be the most loved cars in the industry. Oh yes that answer is very consistent with Hyundai’s new brand slogan, “New Thinking. New Possibilities.” Moreover, all of Hyundai’s new marketing campaigns have that theme embedded everywhere possible. The idea is hardly new but its execution is.

Since the debut of the 5th generation Hyundai Elantra last year, it has become a worldwide success in every market it entered. With its very sensual and stylish design alone, the new Elantra will instantly catch your attention, it is currently the most dramatic in its class. Much like the lines on its smaller brother the Accent and its larger brother the Sonata, the new Elantra’s wind-carved design is not only deliberate but also functional with an outstanding .28 drag coefficient. During our tour of the Hyundai Namyang R&D facility, we did get to see the sophisticated wind test tunnel that helped form the Elantra and its past, current, and near future family members.

Ironically, I got to test the new Elantra’s sustained high-speed stability and aerodynamics not in Korea but in the Philippines over a month before when I reviewed the 1.8 GLS for C! Magazine’s July issue. Our driving test route in its homeland was less than 200 kilometers long but we still got to experience, albeit very briefly, the unique driving conditions that South Koreans enjoy on a daily basis. Our route took us on a variety of roads from carving hill climbs with beautiful landscapes as backdrops to open highways and urban streets. South Korean road conditions are very clean, well organized and very smooth with hardly any imperfections but strictly speed governed so most testers were left with a very good impression of the Elantra’s capabilities.

With the most recent introductions of the Elantra and the titillating new Veloster, Hyundai has graduated to a completely new very positive level. They are no longer playing catch-up; instead, they are forging well ahead backed up by excellent engineering, technology, and tremendous value. Hyundai has done the remarkable; they have made their cars desirable, dynamic, fun and even passionate. Hyundai’s relentless stream of successes reinforced by decades of brand building has finally truly paid off, hence the new mantra. Now that Hyundai is fully established and embraced by the world, and whose only negative critics are only from the very uninformed and ignorant at this point, their new problem now is fulfilling the astounding worldwide demand. In the US market, for example, where the all-new 9th generation Honda Civic has been selling alongside the Elantra since April, the Elantra is the fastest selling compact car by a large margin with a celebrated lot-waiting-period of less than 12 hours! The Elantra is selling so well across the globe that it has a backlog of over 57,000 units and Hyundai is paying its factory workforce double-pay to help accelerate production!

There is much to like about the new Hyundai Elantra, they have the most potent engines in their classes, boast 6-speed transmissions, they’re the largest and most spacious, their loaded with the most balanced standard equipment, have solid 5-year warranties and best of all, are priced aggressively too, the entry level 128 bhp 1.6 liter M/T goes for P738,000, the automatic version of that goes for P868,000 and the top of the line 148 bhp 1.8 GLS with the 6AT is selling for P938,000. I hope that future models will sport proximity keys, push button ignition, HID headlights, and the direct injection and CRDi engines.