First Drive Review
There is a Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, yet most of the city’s populace has never seen anything that could be described as flashy roll off its assembly lines. But the stares are piercing as we drive a 2015 Sonata through the city.
It’s tempting to chalk up the attention paid to our Alabama-built car to the fact that Oprah also is in town, the citizenry preparing themselves for a veritable cornucopia of vehicular gifts. More likely is the fact that the Sonata once again is among the most stylish cars in the mid-size class, even if its lines have been toned down to be more clean than showy. Either way, after sampling the volume model with the 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine, we can say that Sonatas won’t need to be given away in order to find homes.
Handsome Fellow
The new Sonata evolves the previous-generation car’s design. Although less risky than the previous look, details like the available LED taillights, the more rakish roofline, the better-resolved grille, and the furrowed headlamps reflect a new confidence from the Korean company’s design team. The proportions are better, too, with the wheelbase being stretched by 0.4 inch, overall length jumping up by 1.3 inches, and overall width increasing by 1.2 inches.
Inside, the shape of the grille is echoed by an architectural center-stack design that is canted a few degrees toward the driver. The center stack contains two rows of BMW-like interfaces, the lower of which contains HVAC controls in all models. The upper strip serves as a dummy panel in basic cars or houses redundant hard-button controls for the center display in pricier trims.
As in most Hyundai products of late, there’s an obsessive cohesiveness to the interior design that shames many aspirational brands; every piece of text or readout in the car shares the same attractive font and resolution, whether it adorns a button or space on a touch screen. A more satisfying, Genesis-like steering wheel has replaced the previous-generation Sonata’s dished unit, and the driver faces an attractive instrument panel with sharp white-on-black gauges.
The new Sonata’s trim levels have been shuffled a bit from last year; the base GLS is now called the SE and the old SE becomes the Sport. Limited badging carries over for top-of-the-line models. As for engines, the carry-over 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder is now exclusive to a range-topping Sport 2.0T model, while another turbocharged four—displacing 1.6 liters—is installed in the fuel economy–focused Eco model. The SE, base Sport, and Limited Sonatas all get the 2.4-liter four reviewed here, and it drives the front wheels through Hyundai’s in-house six-speed automatic transmission.
GDIsn’t That Less Output?
If you bother to compare the 2015 2.4-liter Sonata’s specs to last year’s 2.4, you might notice that there’s been a downgrade in power. The direct-injected four-cylinder now makes 185 horsepower and 178 lb-ft of torque, 5 fewer horsepower and 1 lb-ft less than last year. Yet there’s much more to this story. The four-cylinder’s variable valve timing is now electrically driven instead of oil-driven, which combines with other minor tuning tricks to improve cold-start performance and move the horsepower and torque peaks lower in the rev range for enhanced drivability. Hyundai similarly overhauled the transmission, but not in search of flashy stats—it simply wanted to build a better, more tractable car.
As before, the 2.4-liter Sonata moves smartly off the line, but the gearbox hunts less and seems more involved in the action. As the car slows to a stop, the transmission moves palpably yet subtly down through the gears, lending a greater sense of connectedness to the driveline. The four-cylinder still sounds a bit coarse in the upper regions of the tachometer, but the experience is otherwise refined and the few ponies lost in the redesign aren’t missed.
