BANG FOR BUCK
Hyundai Venue crossover offers high quality for low price
Astation wagon by any other name would drive as sweet.
Yes, friends, I can mangle a metaphor with the best of them.
Hyundai is pitching the new VVVenue as a vehicle for the “ur- ban adventurer,” whatever or
whomever that might be. They believe this target market is young or youngish, doesn’t have wads of cash and wwwants enough room to move themselves t and their detritus around.
In other words, they want a station wagon.
Wagons are undoubtedly the most logical of automotive ffformats, but because that term is marketing death, Hyundai has to call Venue something else. So, “crossover” it is.
Whatever, it is on sale now, starting at $17,099. Interesting
that this seems lower than the UUU.S. starting price, although equipment levels may differ. Venue competes in a rapidly growing segment. It’s a wee bit smaller than the Soul from sister company Kia and the Kicks from Nissan, to which it looks similar, at least in part due to the colourful paint schemes available on the upper-trim-level model I tested.
Ihave previously postulated
the existence of the secret car designers club, where they all get together and decide what
the next trend is going to be. The multicoloured roof seems to be that thing these days. Venue gets a 1.6-litre fourcylinder engine shoving 121 horsepower at 6,300 r.p.m. and 113 lb. ft. of torque at 4,500 r. p.m. through the front wheels.
Asix-speed manual transmission is standard on the lowest (((“Essential”) trim level. My tester, and surely most Venues sold, will have a CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission), wwwhich for various reasons (see “marketing death,” above) Hyundai chooses to call “Smartstream Intelligent
Variable Transmission.” The colourful exterior is continued inside, with splashes of the same yellowish-orangey shade used outside repeated here and there. The instrumentation is clean
and concise, with a big tach wwwith coolant temperature gggauge to the left, speedo with fuel f gauge to the right.
In between is a small digital screen with a variety of displays, such as fuel consumption, tire pressures and the like.
You can call up information on the go, but to change any of
the settings, you have to be stopped and in Park (handbrake on in manual-equipped cars).
There are storage bins all over ttthe place, with a big open one in front of the passenger’s seat, aaand a lockable glove box under that. t Another nice touch below the centre stack is a flat bin with a corrugated liner to keep your cellphone from sliding around ( don’t forget to hide it when driving in Quebec; I’m told the cops there can be quite sticky about this).
Given the car’s low price, all materials seem of a surprisingly high quality.
Notable among the latter is a textured surface on the dashboard, which not only looks classy but eliminates annoying reflections in the windshield. Acouple of USB outlets allow
you to to plug in your electronics.
Many of the minor functions are controlled via a standard eight-inch central touchscreen, wwwhich, as in other Hyundais, I found f somewhat confusing to operate. I’m sure you’d get used to it.
Apple CarPlay and Android AAAuto are both standard on all trim levels.
Safety gear like forward collision avoidance with pedestrian detection, rear cross-traffic
alert and the always irrelevant blind spot warning system comes on board at the first step
up the trim level ladder. Hyundai’s proprietary BlueLink communication system is
available on the range-topping UUUltimate edition, the most important element of which is aaan automatic call to emergency services in the event of a crash.
Sadly, another element of this is the engine-killing and fuelwasting wwfuelwasting remote start. Hey, you don’t have to use it if you care aabout the health of your car and a that of the environment.
The critical and most-oftenaccessed functions like radio
and HVAC are handled by proper round knobs, which are large and brightly coloured to make them easier to locate.
One thing Hyundai gets right is that the switches for the seat heaters (standard — yay!) and
the steering wheel heater (((optional — boo!) are right together. I mean, if you want one, you probably want the other, and you’d think everyone would do it this way. They don’t.
The front seats feel very good, wwwith sufficiently long seat cccushions to support your thighs t and excellent lateral support. Not a lot of room, however, if you overindulged
during the holidays. It’s even more snug in the back, with legroom at a premium if the front-seat occupants
are on the tall side.
The rear seat split-folds 60/40 to optimize people/cargocarrying options.
The hatch lid reveals a trunk that will surely be big enough for whatever the intended customer is likely to haul. A false floor provides hidden storage; it can be removed to maximize capacity.
My tester even had roof racks; I could not find a specification as to how much weight they could carry, but a small canoe or a wakeboard (look up “lifestyle” in the urban dictionary...) would probably be OK.
On the road, Venue makes a surprisingly good case for itself. Yes, I’m saying that about a121-horsepower car.
The engine goes about its business with a pleasant lack of busyness, staying reasonably quiet even in the upper rev ranges.
There can be a slight pause when you accelerate while the CVT (sorry; “SIVT”) makes up its mind about what ratio it needs.
But once it gets going, it feels decently responsive.
You can actually get a chirp from the front wheels if you attack the throttle hard enough from rest.
Zero to 100 klicks will take over 10 seconds — remember, just 121 ponies. Somehow, it feels quicker than that. Still, passing on a highway calls for some advanced planning. The CVT works well enough for me. It gives you revs when you need them, and not when you don’t.
There is some “motorboating” — the sensation that engine revs and road speed are not directly linked — which is typical of CVTs.
Hyundai has taken away some of this CVT-ness by allowing the engine to rev up before a fake upshift takes place. This works against a CVT’s fuel-saving strategy, but they have to be aware of customer preferences even when the customer is wrong.
It may also cost you a few counts in fuel consumption, as the government figures are worse than the similarly powered and also CVT-equipped Kicks.
Speaking of wrong, the manual override for the transmission — rearward to downshift, forward to upshift — is just plain wrong. Those of you who have seen this mini-rant before can move on to the next paragraph; all the rest of you must remember to know how this should be done is how your body weight is shifted — rearward under acceleration; forward under deceleration. Hyundai gets this right with other models; what went wrong here?
A “drive mode” knob on the console allows you to select a “Normal” setting, with a “Sport” setting to the right, which lets the engine rev more freely (wasting more fuel and not materially improving performance) and “Snow” to the left, which mutes throttle response to reduce wheelspin in slippery conditions.
You’ll probably play with this a few times when you first get the car, then never touch it again. The car rides well and felt surprisingly nimble in the twisty bits.
Most people attracted to a car like this will never know how well it handles.
But everyone likes a car that feels well-composed, even if they don’t know why.
Like all Hyundais, Venue passes the headlights-on test. Shut the car off, and the lights will stay on long enough for you to get into your house (more likely, your apartment elevator for this target market) before shutting themselves off.
Sadly, it gets the auto-lock setting wrong. If I don’t want my doors locked, that should be my choice, not the car’s.
Occasionally, I come across a car that seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. Hyundai’s Venue is one of those.
It’s not fast. It’s not the most spacious in its class.
But it looks, feels and is fun to drive.
With a price tag maxing out in the mid-20s, you can’t ask for much more.
Jim Kenzie is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star.