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This is the 2016 Hyundai Elantra GT and well, frankly it's a bit of a copycat.
The exterior design, to me, kinda looks like the last generation's Mazda 3. The interior design, well, what's that reminding me of?
That's right, the Ford Focus.
It looks almost exactly like what Ford's doing right now.
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It's a bit of a remix of all of the sort of best hits of it's class.
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Everything about this car is very derivative but it still has it's own charms and it's pretty likable.
Under the hood, two liter, gasoline direct injected Engine that puts out 174 horsepower and about 154 pound feet of torque.
The EPA reckons you're gonna get about 27 miles per gallon combined with that engine, whether it's mated with the automatic or manual transmission.
Both of those are six speeds.
The Elantra GT does make a lot of really good sort of first impressions.
When you get in to it, dual zone automatic climate control.
The front seats are heated and cooled.
We've got this optional really large panoramic moon roof above us.
We've also got a really nice sort of blue link navigation system.
It's really snappy.
Everything's really well organized.
And it's just a really nice system to use.
Voice command is a little bit wonky and a little bit slow, but at least it lets you chunk the whole address in in one go and then get back to the business of driving, I do like that.
And when I first got behind the wheel of this car, the first thing I thought is that well it just feels really tight.
The steering system that we've got here is to have a cool feature Called driver selectable steering that lets you sort of change the steering effort from sport to comfort or normal at the touch of a button.
Even it feels very well composed and very well controlled.
Despite all that it does right it does kind of still miss the mark on a lot of features.
For example, that really good dashboard interface It's positioned in the way that, well, it's always getting hit by the sun and just sort of straight up washing out.
You can barely see this thing half of the day, and despite the fact that it's got more power and better performance on paper than a lot of its It's competitors, on the road, it just doesn't feel as snappy, or as zippy as say a Volkswagen GTI or a Ford Focus.
It's not that fun of a car to drive, despite the fact that we've got our optional sports suspension here.
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Hyundai has basically remixed the greatest hits of its genre, and created a new song.
Now you're probably thinking two things right now.
Yes, the music metaphor's a better match for the Hyundai Sonata and you're probably also thinking that at least Hyundai's got that value for the dollar thing going for itself.
Well let's take a look.
The 2016 Hyundai Elantra GT gets off the line at 18,800 bucks when equipped with the manual transition.
This automatic example is 1,000 bucks more.
We've also got the style package which is gonna add bigger wheels and a sports suspension.
And, a tech package which is gonna add that big moon roof and all of the dashboard tech.
You've also got 125 bucks in floor mats, yes you gotta pay extra for that.
And, $825 in destination charges.
That brings you to our as tested price of $26,675.00 bucks.
Now about now you're probably thinking that for that sort of money you can get a fully loaded Ford Focus Titanium five door, arguably a better car for the money when it comes to performance and technology and it'll automatically parallel park itself Plus, you don't have to pay extra for the floor mats.
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