2024 Hyundai Kona (inc. 0-100, braking, autonomy) review

G'day, I'm Paul. So, look, I know it's a bit hard to see, but this car here is the new Hyundai Kona. This one here is the N-line as well, so it's not the full-fat N version because that is dead. They've announced they won't be doing another Kona N, which is a bit disappointing, but this is the entry-level to the N-line. This one here is powered by the mid-spec of the N-line engines. It is a 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol all-wheel drive. It's priced at $40,000, but if that's too expensive, the entire range kicks off from just over $30,000. This competes with things like the Toyota C-HR, the Kia Seltos, Renault Captur. There are a stack of competitors in this segment. Today, we're going to do a detailed review of this car, so if you do want to skip ahead to other parts of this review, you can use the time codes that are on the screen, or if you're on YouTube, you can scroll down and use the chapters below. And if you haven't done so already, subscribe to our channel and press the bell icon. That way, you'll find out every single time we test a tennis ball. Now, let's talk design. So you've got a number of colours to choose from, but only some of them are available here for the N-line. Your soldered colours are free, optional colours are around $600. What do you think of this colour? I've mentioned before that it looks like a tennis ball. If you put a tennis ball right next to it, they're kind of the exact same colour. It is very out there, and in fact, there are a couple of colours within the new Kona range that are out there, and they kind of suit the design because the design is out there. Have a look at this. It's got this LED strip along the front there that looks similar to the Staria, and again, similar to Staria, they've mounted the headlights down low here as well. This is an LED headlight setup. Behind here, you've got these retractable flaps as well for cooling, which help with efficiency. This is going to be a similar design to the full electric version of the Kona when that is released in Australia. There's also a hybrid version of this coming too. So, it is a bit full-on in terms of design, but I don't know, what do you reckon? Do you like the look of it? Let me know in the comments section below. We'll whip around to the side here. So, the N-Line gets slightly bigger wheels. This is sitting on 19s, so you have a machined finish on the outside there and a graphite finish on the inside. It looks really nice, but probably a little bit difficult to clean, given how many sort of divots and stuff you have in there. And slightly lower profile tyre there. It's on 45 profile. Now, this bit here is interesting. So, if you don't go for the N-Line, this is like a dark colour. It's similar to what Toyota's done with their new electric car. But here on the N-Line, it's actually body coloured, and I think the body colour design actually doesn't look too bad. N-Line badge just up there. Over here, you've got an indicator built into the wing mirror with piano black along the top there. This doesn't have that 360 camera system, so you won't find a camera under there that is reserved for the premium version of the N-Line. Roof rails, no privacy glass unless you step up to the top there. Come around to the back, have a look at this. Have a look at this rear. So, another LED strip along the back there. But have a look at this. This looks very similar to the RS3, almost like an identical design, I think. You've got a top-down brake light there, shark fin aerial up the top there, Kona along the back there. Hyundai logo. I should mention as well, I think this is a different Hyundai logo to the other Hyundais I've seen. Maybe I just haven't really noticed all that much recently, but it's got that similar appearance to the new Kia logo where it's quite flush and flat. 1.6T which highlights the engine. Look at these exhaust tips as well. Very trendy there and then a diffuser down the bottom here as well. So, like I said, let me know what you reckon about the design. Is this a little too full on? Would you go for a slightly more sedate colour? Let me know down there. So, we are inside the Kona and we'll start off with the key. There it is. So, you've got lock, unlock, remote start and then blank down the bottom there. You've got a button on the side there to open the boot and then it's blank on the back. This is a proximity sensing key. So, you can just grab the door handle, you've got a push button start just over here. Now, I did mention this in our review of the iron X6 as well. It may just look like a sort of normal key but then when you turn it on the side, you can actually see the Hyundai logo there which I think is kind of cool. Now, what about this cabin? Look, I think it's a big step forward from the old one. I think it looks sort of, it presents really nice and I love the fact that here with the you also get these highlights as well which just really makes it pop nicely but it still has a little bit of an air of, I don't know, it just looks a bit dull to me. I think there's just a bit too much darkness around here and it would have been nice to see them split up the colours a little bit. There's also a lot of scratchy plastic around here as well so, I don't know, I think they could have made this a little bit more premium than it is but yeah, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I do like these two big screens ahead of the driver though so it's cool to see they've gone to a bit of effort with bringing technology as well into the whole package. Now, what about your touch points? So that is firm in the centre there and sort of firm on the door there as well. How firm are they? We've got our durometer, we've tested the main surfaces in this cabin. If you want to see how this car compares to others that we've tested before, look at the link here in the description below. Now, build quality, what's it like? Oh that is fairly wonky there in the centre, a bit disappointing. Not too bad outside of that. Here's our door slam. Now let's talk infotainment. So you have two 12.3 inch displays, you've got one over here and one over here as well. The infotainment display is a touchscreen. In the entry level grade here you don't get inbuilt satellite navigation but you do get smartphone mirroring that is wireless. So I'll show you what that looks like. So you've got Apple CarPlay, look at that, big screen and very high resolution. Really like the look of that, very impressed with that. And this is what Android Auto looks like. So Android Auto is wireless as well, nice full screen integration there and all very snappy as well. On the audio front you have AM, FM, DAB digital radio and that's through a six speaker sound system. Sound system is fine, nothing sort of too special. Head of the driver, you also have a 12.3 inch display. This one is pretty sort of straightforward, nothing sort of too special and it just does exactly what you'd expect it to do and I'll show you what that all looks like once we go for a drive. Let's chat safety, so you have autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian and cyclist detection. You've got a driver attention monitor just there, auto dimming rear vision mirror. You've also got a blind spot monitor built into the wing mirror. You have radar cruise control with a lane keeping assistant which we'll test a little bit later on. You also have front and rear parking sensors with a reverse view camera, I'll show you what that looks like. There it is there. Quality of that is excellent, so you can clearly see what's on our suitcase there, no dramas there at all, so pretty impressed with that. You then have a number of different views there like a towing view and then a super wide angle view as well. This is what the horn sounds like. Now let's chat practicality and we'll start off with your connectivity. You've actually got a really cool setup down here, so you've got two USB-C ports but then you can actually change what the left hand port actually does which I reckon is, I haven't seen that before, it's really cool. You then have a 12 volt outlet but it's hidden behind this little flap here so again just a really cool innovative way to do things. While there's a phone charger down here so you can pop your phone on there, it'll begin charging, you can also then store your phone in a litany of other places here which is really good. Now coffee cup, look at this, so you can whack it down there but as you can see it kind of moves all over the place and you're going to be spilling your coffee everywhere but you then can deploy these two little suckers here and then they hold your drink in position and in the instance of the coffee cup there it's not too bad, you also have teeth on the side there that help you hold things in position. Bottle fits into there without any dramas although this thin bottle does sort of move around a little bit there even with those teeth. Little bottle fits in the door, let's try our big bottle as well. Beauty fits in the door without any dramas. In terms of additional storage you have this sort of console lid here but it's not really much else there and it is a little bit disappointing because you can see everything here, there's nowhere to actually securely store things so they're not visible from the outside so I reckon they could have maybe had a cover for this or done something just to conceal some of your valuable items as well. Glovebox over here, reasonably sized, little slot here as well to store your bits and pieces. Let's check comfort, so you have dual zone automatic climate control, you don't have any heated seats or heated steering wheel but the seats are pretty cool, you've got a partial Alcantara finish, the N logo's in Alcantara as well so I think it is a really cool looking setup but seats are manually adjustable from both the driver and front passenger. Steering wheel offers both tilt and reach adjustment and on our reach test, all that stuff is easy to reach while you're driving. So second row, it is worth calling out, the Kona is longer, wider, taller, the wheelbase is longer so it has grown enormously over the previous generation and you can kind of see that here with the legroom. I've got really decent knee room there, toe room is great and headroom is really good as well so they are very much welcome improvements. You've got map pockets here, that red continues here with the air vents, you also have two USB C ports, a centre armrest with two cup holders. In addition to the cup holders, you've got ISOFIX points for the two outboard seats and top tether points as well and what about our window test? So manual up and down, boom, goes all the way down, very impressive. Now cargo space, it has grown, yay! So you now have over 400 litres of cargo space. Visibly it actually looks bigger than the old one as well which is great news. We've got a spare tyre under here, I'll show you what it looks like with our bags in there. So flappy bag in there, suitcase there and then you've got a couple of little storage slots off to the side with an LED light there as well, hooks too if you need them. If you do want to expand the space though, you can drop the second row and once you get that thing out of the way, it expands the space to over 1200 litres which isn't actually too bad. Okay, so we have just hit the road in the Kona and welcome to the most annoying feature known to man. Hear that? It's telling me I've gone over the speed limit which it has for some reason decided is 20 kilometres an hour even though it's not. And the most annoying part about this is this feature turns itself on every single time you start the car. It's just constantly beeping at you and annoying you. To turn it off, you have to go into the settings menu and then once you're in the settings menu, you have to go over here to this screen and then manually turn off the speed limit warning. So this is probably one of the most annoying features in a Hyundai and a Kia today. That second thing you're hearing there is the driver distraction warning, for some reason it's thinking I'm not concentrating at the moment, it's just constantly flashing and beeping at me. So I'm going to turn off that as well because that is also annoying. So now that all that stuff's switched off, and I actually think safety features like that are totally redundant if you're turning them off every single time you start the car, so I think that urgently needs attention. Now, what is powering the Kona? So this particular spec here, it's a 1.6 litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol. This is available in a two-litre naturally aspirated four-cylinder and also there's a hybrid coming as well. So the good thing here with this particular engine is they've ditched the dual clutch, and thank goodness because it really wasn't a very good dual clutch and they've gone down the path of a torque converter. When we drove the Seltos recently with this engine, I was really impressed with how that felt with the torque converter instead of the dual clutch. So this particular combo makes 146 kilowatts of power and just over 250 Newton metres of torque, so it's not a groundbreaking amount, but equally the car doesn't weigh that much, it's not too far off 1500 kilos. Now, how does all that feel behind the wheel? Let's sink the boot in here. It's actually surprisingly pretty good, it kind of just punches you back in the seat, everything happens nice and quickly there as well, and then you have the assurance of the all-wheel drive system. In fact, you do have this little display here that tells you where it's sending torque as well, so it appears to be always sending torque to both the front and the rear axle, which I think is pretty cool. Now, Hyundai claims a fuel economy of under eight litres per 100 Ks. We are currently sitting on 8.8 litres per 100 Ks, which I don't think is actually too bad, quite impressed with that. Driving in and around town, the ride is actually pretty good, it's sort of fairly soft and sort of cushy, and that's despite this being on fairly low-profile tyres and 19-inch alloy wheels, but the real question is going to be without any local rud and handling tuning, what's it like on our sine waves? So, we'll increase the speed here to 130, which is the maximum speed in Australia, keeping in mind that Kia has done a really good job with tuning of its cars for Australian conditions. Can't you see what this is like with Hyundai's tune on it? So, there's 130, here are our sine waves. Wow, that is really not good. It has just a total lack of body control at that top end, it is really floaty up there, and I think it just shows that it really hasn't got that right tune for the Australian market. And to put something like that into context, I did a drive not that long ago between Adelaide and Melbourne, and even during sections of overtaking, even at 110 Ks an hour, where the road is even choppier than that, and this is a major road, the car that I was in was all over the place, and just imagine if you've got the family on board and stuff, it really is quite an unsettling feeling. So, I think that Hyundai really needs to go back into investing on a local ride and handling tune, because while the car is going to be fine for driving in and around the city, it really does lack that refinement when the speed picks up. Okay, on to our choppy road. So, this is a corrugated, terrible stretch of road. We do this one at 90 Ks an hour, so let's see what it's like. So, it's actually really comfortable. So, the trade-off there, while this doesn't feel like it handles all that well, and it really doesn't have the body control and the sine waves, it soaks up these bumps nicely because of how soft the ride is. So, look, I mean, that's not the end of the world. If you're buying this because you want it for its looks, that's fine, just don't go into it expecting it to be a super sporty car. It does feel like it's designed to be driven more in and around the city. Now, drive modes. We've got Sport, Eco, Normal. Let's pop it into Sport and go for a bang around our track and see what it feels like. A little bit of body roll there because of that softness, but it's interesting. You can kind of feel it leaning over, but this engine is great. It's really picking up pace nicely. Yeah, so that softness that they've engineered into it is affecting the way that it feels around here when the speed picks up because it has a lot of lean on it, and I'm feeling a lot of kickback here through the steering as well as it tries to navigate itself when it's getting thrown around a bit. Yeah, it's interesting. It really doesn't feel as engaging as the last Kona to drive, and certainly the Kona N. I mean, that thing was unreal when we had it around here. This just feels like it's been dialled back a lot in comparison to that. So, yeah, I mean, it's got the N-line badge, but it really doesn't feel like a proper N product like the old one used to. Now, on road noise, even though this is on the sportier tyre, when we tested it with our calibrated sound meter, it actually didn't come up too badly. So, on the noise front, it's actually not terrible. Now, let's check visibility. So, I can see clearly down the front of the car there. It helps that it's very brightly coloured as well. Wing mirrors are a really decent size too with a blind spot monitor built into them. Visibility at the back isn't too bad either. It is a narrow envelope, but it's fine. Okay, so time to test our semi-autonomous systems. We do this at 70 k's an hour. So, I will set cruise control. It's basically designed to give us an idea of how well the vehicle is willing to stay within its lane when it's all active. So, we're going to use the three outer lanes here, and the whole concept is that the further we go out, the more torque it needs to apply to the steering wheel to keep it in position. So, we're in lane one now. Steering wheel is green. Lanes are green as well. It's kind of holding fine there. Jump over to the next lane over. Okay, so it is not too bad. Oh no, that's not good at all. That's just gone straight through that. Okay, not very good. I'm quite surprised by that. I would have thought that it would be at least willing to hold those lanes properly, but it doesn't seem to be very keen to do that at all. So, yeah, I think that system probably needs a little bit of work. Okay, time to do some performance testing. Before we get into it though, Help Me Car Expert. Google it, and we will connect you with some vetted car dealers who will help you get the best deal on a new car today, including some of the cars that are in stock like this one. So, just go to Google, type in Help Me Car Expert, and that page will explain everything for you. Okay, so we don't have an official zero to 100 time, but I've got it in sport mode. We'll dial up some revs. We'll go all the way through to 120 and see how it goes. So, here we go. Okay, a little bark out of the exhaust. Nice. Okay, there's 100 and 120. All right, I'll come to a stop and have a look at how we went. Zero to 100, 7.98 seconds. That's not too bad. 80 to 120, 5.32 seconds. That's not too bad either. Quite impressed with that. All righty, let's go back and do a break from 100 k's an hour. Let's see how quickly this stops. Okay, we'll dial up 100 k's an hour. Anchors down. All right, there it is there. Really good. You can see what that time is. That felt really, really impressive. 100 to zero. Wow, 3.18 seconds and 35.85 meters. It's bloody impressive. It's almost one of the quickest cars we've tested. There you go. Good job, Hyundai. Oh, by the way, if you want to see more about this app that we're using for performance testing, I've left a link in the description below. Now, how quickly does it go in reverse? Here we go. 77 k's an hour. That is not a bad effort. So the new Hyundai Kona, what do we reckon? Look, I think in terms of size and offering, it is a big step forward in terms of dimensions. I thought the old one was really too pokey. This is a huge step forward in terms of how much boot room you have, rear leg room, and the tech is significantly better as well. But it is really let down by its ride and handling. And look, if you're driving it in and around the city, it's going to be perfectly fine. And just for your standard highway driving, it's perfectly fine. But have a look at it. It looks super sporty, and it just doesn't drive as sporty as it looks, which I think is pretty disappointing. And I really do hope that Hyundai goes back to investing in local ride and handling tuning, because I think that is what this desperately lacks. It has all the ingredients to be really good fun to drive, but just feels a little bit sloppy when it's pushed towards its limits. It's also pretty disappointing there isn't a full-fat Kona N version coming as well. But anyway, let me know in the comments section below, what do you think? Have you had a drive of it? Are you enjoying the new Kona? I'm keen for your feedback. If you did enjoy this video, please make sure you like it and you share it with your mates. And if you haven't done so already, subscribe to our channel and press the bell icon. But until next time, take it easy.