Hyundai Verna
Update brings a fresh face, more interior equipment and a new engine that we haven’t yet tested but are very keen to try out
SUVS ARE ALL THE RAGE. SO relentless has been the action around SUVs that you’d be forgiven for thinking the traditional three-box sedan’s goose is cooked. Its time is up. Buyers couldn’t care less.
Call it the last hurrah, but manufacturers are giving the C-segment sedan one last go. And whether by design or sheer coincidence, it is all happening at the same time. I’d credit Skoda with renewing interest in the ‘car’ with its astonishingly well-priced Rider edition of the Rapid TSI. Honda, whose meticulously laid out plans for the fifth generation City went flying out of the window with the lockdown, are now ready with their bread-and-butter sedan. And, as always, Hyundai is ready to respond to the competition with this update to the Verna.
So here’s what we do not have — a turbo engine! With things nowhere near normal,
Hyundai could only manage to get this one car to Pune, the 1.5-litre naturally aspirated petrol with the CVT automatic. Once this car has done the rounds of journos in Pune, it will be swapped with the Verna Turbo doing the rounds in Mumbai. I must give full credit to Hyundai for registering, transporting and making sure we get our hands on test cars. It’s a lot more than can be said of many others.
Anyway, a nat-asp petrol is a welcome change from the norm. As is sitting properly behind the ’wheel. Over the past four months I’ve been driving only SUVs save for two cars — the C 63 AMG and the Polo — and have gotten so used to the lofty driving position of SUVs that sitting low, like how one should be sitting in a car, takes a few minutes getting used to. And it makes you smile. What did we love about the original City? The Zen? The cars we grew up with? The low driving position! Of course the Verna isn’t as low as those cars,
and A pillars will never (thankfully!) be twigthin with modern crash safety norms, but sitting within the car, not on the car like those all pervasive SUVs, makes me happy.
Looking at the Verna also makes me happy. Not that this is the prettiest car on the road but a classical three-box is what we doodled in our school books; nobody ever scribbled out an SUV, at least not my generation. The Verna’s profile remains unchanged from the full model change that it received in 2017 where it grew 65mm in length and 35mm in wheelbase. What we have here is not a full model change and the K2-platform (shared with the Elantra) remains unchanged. What it does get is a significant nose job, with a striking bronze-coloured metalwork kind of effect on the wider grille. Blingy best describes it and this is another reason to check out the Verna Turbo cause that gets a blacked-out grille which looks far better, if you ask me. The bumpers are new, as are the headlamps that have LED lighting and a new DRL signature that looks (sort of) like the McLaren logo. There’s a new design for the 16-inch rims while the rear gets new taillamp graphics. And that’s about it.
On the inside, the dash remains unchanged and to accommodate the infotainment screen that has grown by an inch, the designers have (smartly!) given it a floating effect. There’s also more equipment like the wireless charger but because the architecture is the same, you can’t fit a Max-sized iPhone on the charging pad — an ergonomic flaw that you would not expect from Hyundai. Another irritant is the new digital cockpit that is too fussy, completely eliminates needles (no digital needles either) and gets fonts that remind me of old Casio calculators. The tacho graphics swing counter clockwise and you have to take your eyes off the road and really concentrate on the clocks to make out what is being displayed. Which is probably why they’ve thoughtfully provided numerical readouts, but it is all in the thousandths. At idle it reads 0.7, at full revs it reads 6.3, this is just not intuitive.
The Turbo gets all-black interiors while the rest of the range makes do with a dual-tone finish. The latter is what the Verna needs because this cabin isn’t very spacious and the lighter beige does give it some sense of spaciousness, allied to the new sunroof (which is not panoramic). With the driver’s seat adjusted to how I like it there’s barely enough space for me to squeeze in at the back, the shoulder width makes three abreast a squeeze, the door aperture is narrow not helping ease of ingress-egress, and the headroom is just about enough. Behind the ’wheel though the Verna is very nice.
On the driving front you immediately notice the upgrades to the suspension, which has an even more European feel to it in the firmness of the damping and the more precise rebound. The ride isn’t soft or squishy with the nose staying planted and not bouncing about on
There’s an even more European feel to it in the firmness of the damping and the more precise rebound
undulating roads. Floaty suspension is a thing of the past as far as Hyundai is concerned. The better rebound ensures that when you go over a bump the nose doesn’t pogo but immediately returns to its ride height and stays there. And even though the suspension has been firmed up the ride is actually very good, even better than the Skoda Rapid and far better at ironing out the small undulations and broken patches. Throw it round bumpy corners and the Verna has better composure and damps out mid-corner bumps with better sophistication and polish than the Rapid, which is a massive testament to just how much better Hyundai have got with their ride and handling.
The nose has very good bite along with sharp turn-in and tenacious resistance to understeer. There is a fair bit of body roll and pushing it hard you can feel the rear wanting to get away from you but it doesn’t do anything funny, the Bridgestone Ecopia 195/55 16-inch tyres gripping well. No matter how hard the engineers try, the handling and dynamics of an SUV can never come close to proper cars. And with the Verna, the ground clearance is also very good. The big wheel arch gaps do spoil the styling in profile but it does neutralise the one trump card of an SUV — the ability to get over big speed breakers without scraping its belly.
What Hyundai now need to work on is the steering which, while precise and direct, is lacking in feel and feedback. So while the Verna actually grips really well, from behind the ’wheel you’re not grinning as much as you should. And another thing that needs looking into is the calibration of the ABS that kicks in too early when you hit a wet or gravelly
patch. On dry roads the front disc and rear drum setup delivers good enough stopping distances and the top spec variants also get ESP along with six airbags.
The variant we are testing is the new 1.5-litre petrol that makes 113.3bhp and 144Nm of torque. This is down on the old 1.6 petrol that made 121bhp and 155Nm, but of course if you want performance you’d look at the Turbo. The latter, while only 5bhp up on the power, not only has more torque (up by 28Nm) but it crucially peaks at 1500 and stays flat till 4000rpm, unlike the 1.5 MPI where peak torque comes in at 4500rpm. That means you have to whip the 1.5 motor to really get it moving and that’s where the limitations of the CVT gearbox are evident. Now this gearbox does makes a game attempt at simulating the shifts of a regular automatic with the rise and fall of revs during hard acceleration, as if actual gears are shifting. But this is a CVT and you cannot completely eliminate the rubber band effect, which driving enthusiasts aren’t going to be happy about.
That said, where this powertrain does shine is in refinement. The silence at idle is fantastic. At a relaxed cruise the engine is absolutely inaudible, plus there are zero vibrations filtering into the cabin. It’s a world away from turbo’d engines, especially the 3-cylinder ones. The Verna’s 1.5 also likes to rev, something that will be even more evident with the manual gearbox, though the CVT, I must say, is butter-smooth. In all honesty the Verna is a very, very relaxed car to drive at eight-tenths. Stuck in a traffic jam in Mumbai or Bangalore the Verna will be completely undemanding of you, enveloping you in silence, cooling your backside with the fantastic seat coolers, pumping in crisp tunes via the Arkamys sound system, taking in potholes and speed breakers without crashing, and making heads turn with your rather unconventional choice of a ‘car’. Try it out. You might discover your love for the ‘car’ all over again. And save a fair packet over a similarly-equipped SUV. ⌧
The nose has very good bite along with sharp turn-in and tenacious resistance to understeer