Featured Hyundai IONIQ - Prius competitor?

Bluecar1 thanks for the review. Always useful to get a perspective from someone who made the recent comparison.

 

I got my Ioniq mid November, done 5000 miles since then, lot of motorway and city miles

so any questions just ask

I must admit I was sceptical about the urban mpg being equal or slightly better than motorway, I noticed all hybrids have the same mpg characteristics, but my hybrid loves town and is not so much motorway which is the opposite of what I am used to with my previous petrol and diesel cars

one thing is certain I won't be going back from a hybrid to a std petrol or diesel again

 

It was a response to the comment about visual appeal, which was very much on topic.

Again, there's Ioniq with a modern design attempting to draw mainstream buyers. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but still making an effort to be unique.

Then there's Prime, taking a note from the Lexus division to stand out, with a grille more pronounced than Camry.

 

I have had two good experiences with Toyota cars, one Corolla G6 from 2000 to 2013 and one Prius Plug In from 2013 to 2017. Being very positive, in the meantime I also advised a close friend to buy a Toyota Aygo. But, unfortunately, her experience was as bad as @benlovesgoddess describes; she lost a similar amount of money on that Toyota car. I personally felt quite bad about that, as she was just trusting my advice. So, should I now consider Toyota as a not so reliable brand, as @benlovesgoddess does for Hyundai? From a very bad or very good feeling you might tend to consider your experiences as absolute. But that is not how prediction or statistics work. It is always difficult to generalise from just one or two individual experiences. If you look around on the Internet for more statistical information, you can see that the Korean brands Kia and Hyundai have made a lot of progress in quality; for example, see here, here and here.

So, did I leave the Toyota community because of my one bad experience out of three? No, I did not. However, I did switch to the Ioniq EV, that will be delivered within one or two weeks from now. But that has to do with a variety of reasons, some of them being the quite good EV range and excellent efficiency this car has, which was also confirmed in practice, whereas the Prius Prime that I considered as another option may have an almost comparable efficiency, but certainly has much less EV range.

 

I had to have the radar sensor replaced under warranty, and by sheer fluke, the Kia Picanto (my Toyota dealer is half Kia) courtesy car I was due to take again (ugh!) was switched for a Kia Ceed GT Line. This car looked good - big alloys, twin exhausts, groovy fog/DRLs. It was very comfy, with a great steering wheel and crisp handling. You would never have guessed it was a 1 litre turbo. It didn't feel as fast as the Prius (and proved not to be). The MPG read out started at 31.4 and reached 32 over 50 miles...meaning it cost me a tenner in petrol, when the previous Picanto loan was a mere fiver!

 

i don't advise people on what car to buy, it's always a crapshoot.

 

I have only ever bought 2 new cars, the other 2 dozen were generally £500 bangers.
I feel so cheated and let down by Hyundai, i do think i have the the right to criticise the brand - after all, i paid for the privilege! Hyundai forums were all full of complaints, problems and disappointment.
I do hope your Ioniq is everything you want, and you have none of the faults and concerns that i did with the cheaper i20 model.
Owning the Toyota on the other hand has been very enjoyable, and the forum seems more conversational and full of praise for the brand.
I never felt like recommending Hyundai, but i am happy to recommend Toyota dealers for being more knowledgeable, friendly and helpful and to recommend the Prius as a economical, luxurious and fun car to drive.

 

@benlovesgoddess

in the last 15 years i have purchased 5 new cars for me, and 5 for the wife

I have rarely used the same dealer twice due to sales or after sales issues, but the cars were reliable

I have used local dealers, dealers near my office (100 miles from home at the time), internet dealers

I was loyal to skoda for 15 years, then I have moved to driving Hyundai, my current dealer we have purchased 3 cars from and I can't fault the service from sales or aftersales / service

the reason for the change was for me skoda didn't have a car I wanted at the spec and price I was willing to pay and also their new corporate styling no longer appealed to me, viewed from the front you couldn't work out which car you were looking at and they became bland inside

I did look at other brands, VW (sales staff strutting around with iPads and were only interesting in talking if you were placing an order) walked in spoke to one member of staff who's attitude was you drive a skoda I'm not wasting my time so walked out, peugoet / citroen didn't like there styling, Toyota love the styling of the aygo from the outside but inside nope, looked at a few of the other cars nothing grabbed me

I then went to the Hyundai dealer (to be honest expecting to walk in look and walk out) they had just launched the new i20 and I liked it, the staff were knowledgable and friendly the car was of a spec and price I liked so that was my 1st Hyundai, I did 30,000 miles in 15 months and the worst I had was an alloy replaced under warranty due to corrosion under the lacquer, no quibbles

I suppose in a nutshell, brands can suffer if their styling don't appeal to enough people, there quality is not up scratch, (could just be a single part repeatedly failing or lots of random stuff failing), the sales staff aren't trained or not welcoming, aftersales or service leave a lot to be desired

some of the above is in the hands of the brand, some is in the hands of the dealership management team,

the final point is many people only visit forum due to having an issue, the next biggest reason tends to be find out how to modify / tune the cars (look at briskoda)

 

First post: "GasperG, Dec 8, 2015"

". . . The Ioniq Hybrid and EV go on sale in the U.S. in April [2017 raw], he said. . . . " Source: http://www.autonews.com/article/20170113/BLOG06/170119876/-1

I'm seeing different sources claim the Ioniq plug-in will go on USA sale either "summer" or "fall" of 2017.

Having the car go on sale outside of the USA allows getting the early bugs identified and fixed. But at least we now have a clue as to when Godot might arrive:

ESTRAGON:
Wait.
VLADIMIR:
Yes, but while waiting.
ESTRAGON:
What about hanging ourselves?​

"Waiting for Godot" Act 1, Samuel Beckett
​

Bob Wilson

 

The first new car i tried to buy was the Kia Rio (same as i20, and i preferred it) - the dealer couldnt sell me one....
Same dealer did Alfa and couldnt sell me a MiTo when i tried to get one 2 years later.
Ford dealers wouldnt leave their empty showroom to see me on their rainy forecourt looking at a Fiesta.
Some dealers are useless.
I worry this aimless rambling may alert the topic police...

 

I doubt it as we may have discovered the Ioniq marketing strategy:

VLADIMIR:
Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?
ESTRAGON:
Nothing.
VLADIMIR:
Show me.
ESTRAGON:
There's nothing to show.
VLADIMIR:
Try and put it on again.

"Waiting for Godot", Act 1, Samuel Beckett​

Bob Wilson

​

 

that's an interesting link, as that is the first quote from a Hyundai person linking a date to the Ioniq on sale date I have seen

so far apart from the issue identified by the Korean journalist (rolling back on a car park ramp) which was resolved in a couple of weeks with a software update, and a issue with Bluetooth on early media units (mine is affected and it is a media unit swap, so assume a hardware issue) there have been no issues reported

but if that date is correct before the US launch you will have had the Ioniq available in korea for nearly a year and rest of the world 6 months, so yes the car and its technology should be pretty well debugged apart from US specific changes like no lead acid battery, satellite radio

the only thing that is becoming apparent is the delay of both the launch and information about the launch a number of US customers are becoming very frustrated with the lack of hard information

outside the US the Ioniq seems to be very well received and Hyundai seem to be struggling to keep up with demand, as free stock in the system is now very small and projected delivery dates are now into April here in the UK, the next few weeks all the orders placed in October / November are due to be fulfilled with 2 shipments due in mid / end January so a lot more information on reliability and economy should be available to make a better comparison between the Prius and Ioniq

interestingly the split of hybrid / EV model sales seems to be nearly a 50/50 from the information I am seeing at ioniqforums where I think Hyundai was expecting a 75/25 or a 80/20 split

 

And I'm guessing that the satellite radio stuff would be well-debugged - I'm not seeing anything particularly unique about the Ioniq's infotainment, relative to the rest of Hyundai's lineup.

As an aside (not sure which thread to post this in), the Ioniq Plug-In Hybrid really seems to have its packaging act together, having seen one at the Detroit Auto Show. I think (haven't confirmed) that they copied the Volkswagen Golf/Passat GTE and Audi A3 e-tron layout in this regard, which basically means the fuel tank is roughly where the spare tire would go in the normal hybrid model, and the battery is under the seat. (And, the Audi A3 e-tron also has a nicely packaged battery and fuel tank arrangement. Really, what this boils down to is, an irregularly shaped fuel tank is very easy to make, where an irregularly shaped battery becomes quite expensive to make.) It certainly makes the Prime look like a joke in this regard...



(That's a Golf GTE diagram there, and it's what I think Hyundai is doing. Both the VW products and the Ioniq Plug-In Hybrid have fuel tanks in the same size ballpark as the Prius Prime (within 1 gallon, although both are a bit smaller), and they have similarly sized batteries (8.8 to 8.9 kWh).)

 

Cars are such complex things now. I just looked at a document used to teach service department managers and service reps about the changes in a car undergoing a major refresh. It is around 180 pages of pretty dense reading. This is not the actual service manual a mechanic might use, just the system overview differences!

Car dealers and their sales staff are often clueless. Both on the details of a car and its options and in how to deal with the potential customer. I have the "policy" of never making a decision in front of a salesperson. Sometimes that means I walk out the door and turn right around. Often it means the deal gets better just before I hit the door. But once I had the salesman tell me "if you don't take this deal, you are a dummy". At which I turned around, asked for the sales manager, and told him why his dealership had made it impossible for me to ever buy from them. I went across town that night and bought the same car for the same price.

Toyota dealers are sometimes no better. I'm still waiting for the free over the air map update the salesperson said was available for my second Toyota.

 

I haven't seen any images of the plugin battery shape and position, its well documented the hybrid and plugin have independent rear suspension and the EV has torsion beam rear suspension to give room for the battery pack without compromising boot space too much, and there are diagrams of the battery layouts for hybrid and EV, but not yet for the plugin

 

Having lifted the trunk floor (as you would when pulling the spare out of a car with a spare tire), I suspect I was seeing the fuel tank in the trunk, though...

 

sorry, missed the bit about you seeing the plugin at Detroit,

I didn't think many car maker put the tank in that area as it's then the crumple zone if the car gets rear ended with the associated risk of damage / leakage, and most fuel tanks are outside / under the main body so the flammable fuel is not inside the car

 

Well, this is pushed further forward than a spare tire, at least, it seemed to me.

I should've gotten a picture...

 

Today I got my new Ioniq Electric. As a proof, below you can see it in front of my house:



So, I had to hand in my PiP (snif) with which I have started to enjoy pure EV driving in the past 4 years so much; my final score over the 4 years was 82% EV and 18% HV. My commitment to EV driving has developed so strongly that it was inevitable to switch to a pure BEV car.

 

congrats jan, i feel the same way!