Review _ 2018 Hyundai Accent _ Small Cars Still Matter

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enHere I am piloting the new Hyundai Accent and I'm gonna tell you flat-out that this makes so much sense driving a car like this and I thought about it a lot over my week with this vehicle and you know you get out of cars recently like a McLaren a track Hawk and LC 500 H and you just lose sight of reality and this is back to basics it's a car that almost everybody can afford at least in the u.s. either VL alone or small down payment or cash and there's something extremely freeing about that type of experience with a car one that there's not a lot of complication here to that it is pretty much basic and does everything that you want it to do without being just too much you're not gonna worry about it you're not going to think about where you're gonna park it or if somebody's going to mess with it and then you don't have to think about the depreciation the every mile you're gonna put on it isn't going to bankrupt you in five years and I think that's one of the best parts about driving this car is you can log so many miles on it you're not gonna have a huge penalty in terms of fuel economy I'm getting pretty much 40 miles per gallon regardless of how I Drive it and you know what everything just works the steering feels okay the brakes feel okay the comforts pretty good and for the most part it doesn't look horrible either so when you roll this thing to a stop you know I think the biggest problem with it is there's pretty much this you want to get out in traffic you put the hammer down it sounds like three raccoons got in your trash can and had a fight I mean it just sounds horrendous this is you know classic unfiltered 4-cylinder if there it's so slow it's it's such a putter that you feel horrible just pushing down the accelerator on this because it's one of those few cars that gives you absolutely nothing for you know for trying to go flat out the only thing it hurts is your wallet in terms of fuel economy so that's one of the things about this car that you have to just totally put out of your mind if you can forgive the fact that this thing is painfully slow and it does everything else well you know then this might be the car for you now let's talk about handling or the way that the suspension set up is over broken pavement and at a car in this price point with a torsion beam rear end even though they've improved the dampers in the back and the angles at which it's at this still has a very trampoline like ride over bad pavement it's under dampened which means it's going to ride soft or over broken pavement it's not overly firm but it just doesn't have good body control now when you get on medium pavement surfaces you know stuff that's not really broken you don't notice it as much unless you're sitting in the back seat and I think that's where you're gonna feel the most pain of riding on bad pavement is the closer you get to that that rear half of this car the more springing it gets and it's definitely a downer of this vehicle but again at this price point you can't have everything pretty much over every other pavement surface it's really good it's really controlled it's pretty soft but this is not like an inspiring handling car either I can't wait to get off this bad payment here I'm gonna come to a stop kind of show you the transmission performance and now this has a six speed torque inverted automatic takes about three weeks to get to sixty does not add paddles but it does have a manual mode in the column here and if you pull a gear there is no rub matching there is no trickery it's just a car that you leave an automatic and you try to get the best fuel efficiency possible the truth is this is a car you can drive every day it's a car that you can drive every day and not feel bad about driving it it gets great fuel efficiency it's pretty simple overall and you're not gonna have to worry about a ton of shipbreaking you can work on it yourself you can basically just enjoy piling the miles on this if you need a straight-up commuter and you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of a year and realized you lost twenty thousand dollars in value on it like some of the more premium cars or midsize cars it just has such a low buy-in that you don't have to deal with a lot of the crap of the more expensive car and that's why I really enjoy seeing vehicles like this that you know brands like Hyundai and Kia have not given up on the small car dear Lord I came back for a real good one yeah some premium engineering I like the fact that you avoid real cars like the McLaren I was busy the elsi 500 H the track Hawk and you come for this yes I was busy for the McLaren I was piloting the supercar in a monsoon yeah that's true which we're gonna talk about later but right now we are going to talk about the fifth generation Hyundai Accent this bad boy has been around for a long time and while your is the first year I think like 94 no it's got to be longer than 94 but it you know it was in other countries I don't know that the first generation was in America my history doesn't go back that far but I can tell you what the fourth generation was called in Mexico oh yeah you already know good jiminy the Dodge attitude oh the fourth gen accent was a Dodge attitude in Mexico really yeah I wish we would have had that here Dodge might have a killer compact car on it well that's the next thing screw the demon they need an attitude now yeah you're right so what we're looking at is the absolute most basic transportation you could possibly own other than the Kia Rio that I looked at and this is very similar but this is a true sedan form-factor saloon yes saloon so what's there to talk about first I don't know nothing about this you don't really need to know everything you want to know it's what you see is what you get it's all stamped steel there's no aluminum its struts and super easy to work on in service in I you take a look at this altitude change the heater core for me real quick yeah just take you can take that dashboard I'll watch well you know like basic basic maintenance you don't have to take covers off I mean this is like old school stuff here from the previous generation they use 13% more high-strength steel which means the torsional rigidity is up by over 30% so that not only is this a stiffer structure it's quieter it rides better as what you would expect from a new generation subcompact and you'd always hope you would hope right and now that the competition and small cars seems to be disappearing this is a pretty compelling package for the price you can get this car for about fourteen thousand five hundred bucks the base with a matte 6-speed manual that's crazy I know it's cheap and you get a lot for your money sir president the pool started so in the back Scott this is what you would expect from a b-segment car a torsion beam rear end and there's there's a couple things to talk about with it one there is some attempts at trying to use paneling for aerodynamics you pointed out one of them yeah well I mean I get why it's not on that side it would melt but it's just hard to believe that does anything yeah I agree with you cuz you think the air would blow back here and just take cotton there's nowhere to go I'm sure there's an element of parachuting in there but you know clearly they're they're trying but with the panels and the airflow here so just because you're not spending a lot of money doesn't mean that they're totally cheaping out on it now everything else back here is this basic as you can possibly get and basic and not a bad way and no basic is good is good in a car like this mm-hmm yeah I think the more cars we get into the more cars that we see I wouldn't want to own half of them honestly I just wouldn't that's what I keep saying I cannot wait to see these cars when they're 10 years old the current models yeah touch screen don't worry yeah all the electronic parking brake seizing up and all that crap surprisingly I mean the parking brake spot for a long time never have had replace one of those calipers yet really and I can't believe it hmm I guess well well maybe it's only one company building those and they all buy it from the same people and they've mastered it I don't know I'm sure they're getting replaced but I'm ever done one yet okay well that's good but you don't have to even worry about that because you have a manual hand break with a cable here so it this is pretty clear you can drift it and fold your tire and when you hit a curve yeah yes yeah that's what I'm gonna be doing I'm gonna be doing some parking lot slides with this so the other thing to note is undercoating isn't the greatest in some places but but the seams the body it eases yeah look at compared to the Infinity yes it's like they had a blind guy doing it like just spraying it on it or are using the mirror and with a can and a while yeah and that's one thing you'll notice about the hyundai products now is a lot of the attention to detail on the underbody the adhesives the glues everything is put on obviously this is robotically done you know everything is really neat and tidy there's no spackling of crap there's no missed areas and you know hopefully the car stays quieter and rides better in the long term now what you don't know is if this is gonna turn into a straight-up rust rocket after ten years because there is surface rust on the front and all the typical uncoated you know steel areas so that's one thing I'd be curious to see after about five to ten years about bad this is gonna look underneath well out of Hyundai's and Kias going back to a certain point they've been holding up pretty well okay I mean yes they had a recall they want to coat the front subframe because they don't want to pay for it on certain years but I mean back in 94 wasn't 94 was it not this and now it was like an XG r yeah that X yeah whatever it was like the Infinity ripoff yeah whenever that the first year is we had a customers one was a broken frame oh whatever I mean 90 something do they replaced it for free damn I don't think they've been doing yeah but that I mean those things are rotted out back down but the newer ones yeah not as not nearly for a mid 2000s to now I don't I've never seen one totally rotted alright well the only other thing to talk about is the suspension on the back and I showed you the diagram and I'm going to put this on the screen for you is the damper angle has changed and it has changed to improve overall ride quality and compression and rebound which means that damper was on a much wider you know obviously a different angle and this is a lot well it's more straight up and down so the stroke that the ride quality and this is much better than the previous generation was final thoughts on the Hyundai Accent make no mistake this is budget transportation and you have to judge it in that manner with this being almost fully loaded it's right around eighteen five or eighteen nine if you strip a lot of this away like some of the safety stuff the fluff on the interior the proximity key where you just have to turn the key manually you know you can lose about two to three thousand dollars off the price and I think that's where this is at it's bus it doesn't look horrible it looks mainstream it's really well put together it feels solid it's not totally noisy until you start pushing down the accelerator and I think for the most part this does everything so well that this is a great mainstream car for somebody that does not want to waste a lot of money on new vehicles and doesn't want to deal with the nonsense of the use market if you're not good at finding used car you don't know what to do at least you buy this you get a warranty you're never gonna have to deal with it and you don't have the depreciation you know the less you pay the less you're gonna lose in the long run and that's a huge factor of this does it ride the best no is it the quickest thing it's not you can't even say quick with this car does it handle well no but it's super efficient it's really comfortable there's plenty of room on the inside there's a lot of storage space the ergonomics are great the infotainment works good the sound system is good and you get great fuel efficiency if I hadn't said that already so that's what you're gonna look at with this the big the last big thing about it is the running costs you take a look at how you do the maintenance on it you can get at everything on this car you could literally do work yourself on here and not feel totally overwhelmed tire costs are pretty low for the most part everything is going to be as simple as you can possibly get with a modern car and that's why I really like this thing honestly you just get so tired of everything being so overly complicated and this is more back to basics take care I'll see you next time simple simple simple simple and even taking this intake off whether it be that bad no I mean everything you can get to let me get to the backside I mean it's just I mean yeah if you don't want to work on anything of course but at least there's enough space in here to do\n"