Ultimate tech
Top-of-the-line Sonata has gadgets and comfort to spare
Fellow car buffs and gadget geeks, remember being a kid and imagining the sorts of things our cars would be able to do one day?
Push-button start, autonomous driving, and voice command were some of my favourite daydreams.
Today, they’re standard kit on almost everything. Flying cars were on my list, too. You win some, you lose some.
Fast-forward a few decades and I’m test-driving the newfor-2020 Hyundai Sonata Ultimate.
There are plenty of reasons to give this one a look, but the real secret sauce with the
Sonata on the feature front boils down to two that will quickly become the techfiend’s favourite new toys: Smart Park and Blind View Monitor.
SMART PARK
I expect tech like this to arrive on the scene via a six-figure Mercedes or Cadillac before an eventual trickle-down into the mainstream.
But it is here now, for a few ticks under $40,000, in the Sonata Ultimate.
Remote-controlled parking exists elsewhere in modern cars, but just barely.
You’ll find it in a sliver of the market’s expensive luxury machines, usually bundled into an options package for a few thousand dollars. Forget trickling down: although it’s a rarely offered option at several times the Sonata’s price, Hyundai has brought it into sub-$40,000 territory. The system lets drivers use the remote key fob to manoeuvre their car forward or backward in a straight line for a short distance, at a very low speed, while they stand nearby.
You could, for instance, move the car out of its parking space at Costco as you walk up, for easier loading. When you get home, back into the driveway, unload your groceries, and reverse the car back into the garage afterward.
And you can do all of that without getting back inside.
Just press the corresponding button on the remote.
The hazards activate, there’s a moment’s pause that allows the driver to do a triple-check of the surroundings, and the Sonata heads at not-quite-walking pace in the direction you select.
Its built-in radar and camera systems are on full alert to monitor and measure the parking situation.
Stopping the vehicle in place is as simple as releasing the button on the remote.
All gear shifting is autonomous, and the driver can toggle the engine on and off to begin or end parking via the remote — and just walk away.
Do you need this feature? No, of course not. But the latest gadgets aren’t always about necessity.
Sometimes they’re about having talk-of-the-office feature at the moment, a fun new toy to play with, and the possibility of added convenience in certain situations.
BLIND VIEW MONITOR
The other feature that got my inner geek excited is the Blind View Monitor. As a kid, I never even imagined this one and as an adult car reviewer, I’d never encountered this before.
Fully capitalizing on the high-resolution display of the Sonata Ultimate’s entire instrument cluster, Blind View Monitor simply replaces the digital tachometer or speedometer ring with a rear-facing camera feed down the corresponding side of the car when you signal.
Honda’s Lane Watch camera was in this territory first, though the Sonata’s got better display graphics that pop up in the instrument cluster, not the central screen.
The Sonata’s system works with lane changes in either direction, while Honda’s only covers the right-hand ones.
Again, it’s not a need-tohave feature because there’s also blind-spot monitoring, windows, mirrors, and the presumably rotatable head sitting atop the driver’s shoulders. But I appreciated the Blind View Monitor system the most in heavier city traffic, as an additional means of keeping apprised of my surroundings.
I’m based in northern Ontario, where heavy city traffic pales in comparison to that experienced by many drivers in bigger centres further south. For many of those drivers, I’d hazard a guess this system could be a confidence booster when it comes to getting around safely in a busy downtown core.
Living in northern Ontario also got me thinking about the also-new-this-year Subaru Legacy GT. Priced similarly to the Sonata Ultimate, it gives you a boatload more power from its larger engine, and all-wheel drive, which is not on the Sonata’s options list.
The Legacy isn’t as fancy in terms of gadgets and styling, but drivers after an extra helping of winter driving swagger may want to consider this alternative.
It’s nice to have choices.