Relying on Glam Style in a Crowd of Athletes

Standing in his parents’ driveway in Great Barrington, Mass., my girlfriend’s cousin, 13, regarded the lustrous gray scarab that appeared before him one morning last summer. “What do you think?” I asked. With the dispassion of a Westminster Kennel Club judge, he walked from the creature’s rear three-quarter aspect to its profile, then around the nose before returning to the three-quarter.

 

“It looks a lot faster than it probably is,” he concluded.

Indeed, the Hyundai Veloster, which began sales in 2011, suggests a predacious Looney Toons castoff. But in the 130-mile drive from my block in Brooklyn to the Berkshires, taking in choppy outer-borough highways and wending two-lane state roads, the hatchback evoked not a bombastic cartoon, but the Tiburon. That coupe, produced by Hyundai in the 1990s and 2000s, had the lines of a kit-car Ferrari and the dynamism of an ox cart.

It is likely that Hyundai knew this about the Veloster. Introducing it at the 2011 Detroit auto show, John Krafcik, chief executive of Hyundai Motor America, said the car could be driven “at nine-tenths without losing your license.” Downshifting to maintain 45 miles per hour up a rise in western Massachusetts, as traffic tightened behind me, I merely lost my patience.

What Mr. Krafcik withheld was that those nine-tenths would be difficult to wring from the car’s 138-horsepower 1.6-liter 4-cylinder engine. So when Hyundai unveiled the 201-horsepower Veloster Turbo at the 2012 Detroit auto show, a reconciliation between the car’s extroverted exterior and rather gutless on-road demeanor seemed plausible.

The packaging of the Turbo suggested as much. Aside from raising the engine’s output by 46 percent, Hyundai treated the Veloster to cosmetic upgrades that, pleasingly, rendered the vehicle more carlike than cartoonish.

The Turbo I drove wore side skirts, LEDs beneath its headlights, deepened sculpturing around the fog lamps, 18-inch alloy wheels with polished chrome accents and chrome-tipped twin exhaust pipes recessed above a matte-finish diffuser. There was also a matte-gray paint job, a $1,000 option over the car’s $22,725 base price.

Not long ago, such finery was the primary province of supercars. Three cheers for economies of scale.

The nonturbo car is offered with a 6-speed dual-clutch semiautomatic transmission, a $1,250 option over its suggested starting price of $18,225, but that gearbox is not available in the Turbo. It gets a conventional 6-speed automatic, a $1,000 option, which is calibrated for more aggressive driving than the dual-clutch unit.The transmission fitted to both of my test models was the standard 6-speed manual. Derek Joyce, a Hyundai spokesman, said roughly 30 percent of Veloster buyers were opting for the stick shift, outstripping the industry average in the United States of about 7 percent, according to Edmunds.

The sixth gear of the manual unit acts essentially as an overdrive, reducing engine speed to preserve fuel economy on the highway. Beyond horsepower figures or paint jobs, that sixth gear also illuminates a fundamental difference between the two Velosters.

The nonturbo car labors to build speed for overtaking, which might dissuade a driver from probing the car’s limits — all the better to preserve its billboard-worthy highway fuel economy rating of 40 miles per gallon. On the 87 octane gasoline that carried us from Brooklyn to Great Barrington and on to southern Maine, the Veloster returned 37 m.p.g., remarkable considering the mix of roads and our abuse of the air-conditioner.

Under no circumstances, however, should a Turbo equipped with the stick shift be expected to replicate its highway fuel economy rating of 38 m.p.g. (though the around-town estimate of 26 m.p.g. is reasonable enough). For one, a driver regularly drops down a gear or two to muster passing power, causing the engine to spin more furiously and burn more fuel. For another, the Turbo in such moments feels most like a vehicle worth driving.

Peak torque of 195 pound-feet is produced in the Turbo from 1,750 r.p.m. to 4,500 r.p.m., but in the manner of competitors like the 201-horsepower Honda Civic Si and the 180-horsepower Scion tC, the car is most alive at the rowdy end of the tachometer. The base car builds speed adequately enough; Motor Trend observed a run from zero to 60 m.p.h. in 8.8 seconds. Though the Turbo accomplished the feat in a respectable if not blistering 6.9 seconds, it goads the driver to keep pushing, with much of its power band left to be exploited above 60 m.p.h.

 

The license loss to which Mr. Krafcik alluded in Detroit is infinitely more plausible in the Turbo.

Were the thrills more readily accessible, the Turbo would make a raucous alternative to the Civic Si, which is benchmarked by automakers and beloved by aftermarket tuners for its exploitable power band, poise and relative stealth. The Veloster buyer cares not for stealth, but it is fair to expect a small car like the Turbo, which can cost $26,000 when fully optioned, to nail the fundamentals that cheaper cars like the tC and Kia Forte Koup manage without much fuss.

For example, fitted with all-season tires, both the Turbo and nonturbo did not carve New England curves so much as skitter around them, and the cars’ noses tended to dive into corners.

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Where the Veloster outpaces its competitors, offering glimpses of the Korean automaker that so spectacularly improved its products worldwide over the last five years, is in the cabin. Standard on both cars are a seven-inch multimedia screen, Bluetooth, audio controls on the tilt-telescoping steering wheel and nicely contrasting dash materials.

Stubbornly, however, Hyundai does not allow the $2,000 Tech package, consisting of automatically adjusting headlights, backup warning sensors and special wheels, to be ordered independently of the $2,000 Style package, with its panoramic glass roof and various interior and exterior enhancements. The Turbo includes many of those options, but you have to buy the $2,500 Ultimate package to get the panoramic roof, navigation, rear camera and automatic headlights.

Had the Veloster reached showrooms two years ago, it might have been welcomed as a belligerent Ziggy Stardust sent to kick glitter in the eyes of the tC, Forte and, in the Turbo’s case, the Civic Si and Volkswagen GTI. A 24-year-old might have regarded it as a PlayStation avatar rendered real. In 2012 came a bumper crop of excellent new sport compacts. Glam design cannot compensate for middling performance or value.

At the Turbo’s end of the market, a 252-horsepower 2013 Ford Focus ST, priced from $24,495, may be the most entertaining new front-drive car in America. The “front” qualifier is important, because within $1,000 are respectably equipped versions of the rear-drive 2013 Scion FR-S and its stepsibling, the Subaru BRZ, and Hyundai’s own Genesis 2.0T. These are carving tools that require higher-octane gas, have lower fuel-economy ratings and negligible rear seats, but could humble a Turbo with their chassis balance alone.

Irrespective of age or psychographics, consumers value a product that meets or exceeds their perception of it. By that standard, the Veloster is simply not as fast, frugal or fun as it looks.

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