Hyundai Accent GLS: No Upmarket Fun

[ase]

Today I finished My Name is Asher Lev, about which more later, and drove a 2005 Hyundai Accent GLS with manual locks, mirrors and seat controls, and incidentally hated it for extremely petty reasons. I didn't like how it handled on the highway; I accidentally flicked the lights off four times while signaling lane changes; I hate, hate, hate manual mirrors in a way people who use carshare programs or rent frequently can hate car adjustments. The sound system was not to my standards - "boom car" is supposed to be facetious hyperbole - and the buttons on the (after market?) CD/radio are too tiny. There was one cupholder, placed too far back for easy use. The brakes didn't feel right, but that could be maintenance as much as intrinsic mechanics. Basically, every time I thought I'd adjusted to the car, some other small, irritating facet would surface. (Seriously: lights off four times. I am shocked I didn't get pulled over for a sobriety check.) Cursory googling suggests Hyundais are reliable cars with decent engineering, which I believe from my one completely positive and frankly astonishing experience: I parallel-parked the Accent on the first try*. If I were buying a town car, I might be pretty happy with the Accent's reliable, economical "meh", but I suspect I'll log mad roadtrip hours in the first three months or so of car ownership, so being unhappy with highway performance is not acceptable.

Consider this the first of an occasional series, likely to continue until I actually buy a car. The current car deal-killers are: maintenance and repair costs, manual passenger-side mirror, fails highway clover-leaf merge test, visually difficult instrument panel design. Let's see what else turns up during several months of sporadic test-driving.

*I couldn't parallel park a Prius with a fisheye camera on the first try. hourglasscreate can personally attest to my lousy parking. Good parallel parking is actually a huge mark in the Accent's favor, so the '05 base model may be out, but I could be persuaded to test drive a model with automatic mirrors and an improved sound system.

Comments

[sraun]

Why is manual passenger-side mirror a deal killer in a car that is going to be nearly exclusively driven by you? My experience is that you get them adjusted once, and then have to touch them maybe once or twice a year after that. For a shared car, I can definitely see why they're awful!

[ase]

Like I said: I hate, hate, hate manual mirrors in a way people who use carshare programs or rent frequently can hate car adjustments. Intellectually I understand it'll be mine and there will be no adjustments. Emotionally, this was the very first thing I thought of for the O HAI NO list, beating out anything reasonable, like engines and A/C.