Korean Cars

I'm a little concerned about what I'm reading here guys.

Do you mean to tell me that even though I bought a $55k VW Passat that I am not actually seen as a highly successful and desirable 35+ year old professional male with a 6 figure salary that also has a highly desirable partner waiting at home for me when I return from the surf/mountains/or inner city corporate office?

Please don't tell me this is so, otherwise I might just have well bought a bloddy Kia/Hyundia/Toyota/Mazda/Honda/Holden/Ford/Subaru :(

Relax, you bought the right car

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Originally Posted by brimway

Relax, you bought the right car

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i would have to agree. my cousin's just ordered a passat wagon. nice package...

but you arent the world's strongest billionaire just yet :P

phew, for a moment there I thought I was going to have to get rid of the VW and buy a IS250!

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Originally Posted by kleung

if I was looking for a cheap, small car, I'd have no qualms about owning an i30. I drove one last year while I was test driving new cars for my father, and came away impressed, considering the price.

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I'm currently driving one of these as a hire car and it is categorically the least enjoyable car that I have EVER driven. Generally, it seems reasonable value for the money (well built, loads of gear for what is presumably a base model) but actually driving it is a chore.

The biggest culprit is the steering. It feels like there is almost no caster in the front end geometry so there is very little self centering. The power steering has been set to give the steering reasonable weight but you still feel the weight in both directions when you have lock applied so there is no feedback as the to wheel position and you end up continually making corrections through turns and even on straight roads.

As for the rest, the 2.0 litre petrol engine is quite tight since we drove it out of the rental lot with 190km on it but still feels very flat, struggling whenever we encounter steep hills. When the automatic gearbox kick down, the engine screams rather raucously but doesn't seem to delivery much more power. Fuel consumption is looking quite poor at the moment with only only a quarter of the 53l tank left after only 450km of country (mainly highway) driving. Hopefully, this will all improve as the engine runs in.

The interior is full of cheap materials - all the plastics are hard and the seats feel like they are covered with the sort of foam backed synthetic cloth used on my daughter's toy doll cot.

Road manners are pretty reasonable with some built in but not excessive understeer, decent grip and body control at the expense of a rather jiggly ride (even with 195/65R15 tyres) and a fairly quiet interior aside from tyre roar on coarse surfaces.

My wife, who is no motoring enthusiast, was wondering why I was complaining so much about the car until she drove it herself and experienced the steering. She thinks it is much worse than any other car that she has driven and we both find it tiring to drive because you have to consciously steer the car at all times.

All in all, it is no match for the Suzuki Liana that we hired 5 years ago or even the Hyundai Sonata 3 years ago so I really have to wonder at all the motoring journalists who, 4 years ago, praised this car as the great leap forward by Hyundai for Korean cars and still rate it as a decent option in today's market segment. Give me a Corolla any day.

Just to add to this topic receantly i was in sydney cbd and after a hotel
Vallet parking not knowing how to drive a t4 transporter i opted to drive it for them they sent a Korean student with me and we got talking about cars and i told him how i thougt hyndai is climbing in design and sales around the world and he told me that he prefers Kia as the old designer of Audi now works for them and he has high hopes for kia having him on their crew i dont know the guys name but the Korean kid knew it, also sounded legut but he could have been full of it...

Cheers
Al

They have the same designers working for both companies, as Kis is majority owned by Hyundai. I just bought a Santa Fe and the diesel engine in it is also used in the sister Kia car. It does have more hard plastics than I'm used to, but a lot of 4wd cars seem to anyway, they aren't like the Nissan type though, you have to touch some of them to check as they look like soft touch.

The engine is really good, it pulls, I struggle to find any turbo lag, and so far its at 8L/100 in city traffic and still dropping at 900km since new. Not bad for a 2 tonne car where the only other alternatives were all V6 engines. The keyless entry/push button start is useful, my only comments would be that I miss the going home/leaving lights which is odd it doesn't have them as it does have auto lights (might be turned off), and when you turn it off, you don't get all the interior lights coming on but again that might be a setting that needs to be enabled. No rattles, squeaks etc, and unlike some VWs and even a Mazda 3 Rob Tait had that other day, the parts are all aligned properly and no weak clips holding them on. He had a 3 were the glass was all wonky in all the doors with the 3 and said they always are like that.

I had an auto Getz a few weeks back and hated though, I haven't been a car that can't make the speed limit up a hill for so many years I didn't think they still existed anymore. I've driven the manual ones and not noticed it, but boy the auto is a dog.

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Originally Posted by woofy

They have the same designers working for both companies, as Kis is majority owned by Hyundai.

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Whilst Hyundai does own Kia, he is only working for Kia.

Peter Schreyer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Also, note what the Germans are reporting on Hyundai.

Hyundai

Korean cars?.......pffffftt. Like a lot of you, I get to drive a number of cars for various reasons, hire on holidays, relatives, friends etc. We have a Mk VI GTI & Mk V Golf Sportline in the family, and I think they're damn good cars, for the right reasons. Solid, efficient, comfortable, capable, quick, and that 'feeling' it was built by people who know their cars. I was one of six in a hire Kia Carnival just recently,
its a typical Asian car, feels like crap. Some months ago I was a passenger in an i30. Am I missing something?, that thing is a boring piece of bad plastic. We hired a Toyota Rav (new) in Queensland recently. Another piece of boring bad plastic. It must be me, any Asian-built car under $60k just looks and drives like a cheap laughable attempt at building anything with any character or finesse. I feel better now.

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Originally Posted by tessie

Korean cars?.......pffffftt. Like a lot of you, I get to drive a number of cars for various reasons, hire on holidays, relatives, friends etc. We have a Mk VI GTI & Mk V Golf Sportline in the family, and I think they're damn good cars, for the right reasons. Solid, efficient, comfortable, capable, quick, and that 'feeling' it was built by people who know their cars. I was one of six in a hire Kia Carnival just recently,
its a typical Asian car, feels like crap. Some months ago I was a passenger in an i30. Am I missing something?, that thing is a boring piece of bad plastic. We hired a Toyota Rav (new) in Queensland recently. Another piece of boring bad plastic. It must be me, any Asian-built car under $60k just looks and drives like a cheap laughable attempt at building anything with any character or finesse. I feel better now.

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vw mg6 golf + character? lol.... i take it you HAVENT read any hot hatch reviews since the mk6 came out?

i think the joke's on me, for taking this ^^^ seriously for the first few minutes.

nothing against the mk6 whatsoever. i think they're a good bit of kit, but you make out like vw to toyota is like swiss stamped Pamp bullion to a rusty piece of metal on the side of the road, when it's not the case, unless you're hilariously biased.