What it is: A small front-drive, four-seat coupe to replace the Tiburon. Hyundai will position the car below the rear-drive Genesis coupe.Platform: The Hyundai Veloster will share some of its parts with the compact front-drive Accent.
Competition: Ford Focus coupe, Honda Civic coupe, Mitsubishi Eclipse, Scion tC.
The Hyundai Veloster is a front-drive coupe with a pretty sleek profile on the driver's side. Until it dawns on you that the door is shorter than on the driver's side and that there's another door behind it. Hyundai says that - unlike the Mini Clubman - the door arrangement will be properly reversed for us right-hand drivers.
Engine is a 1.6 turbo, and there's a twin-clutch transmission option.
Inside it's got the usual show car touches including multi-part display screens, pod seats and suicide doors. But it also has something Hyundai is introducing on its production cars: BlueLink. This is a fully voice-activated connection pack for phones, music, nav and reading and composing emails.
Composing smart or funny or well-argued ones is definitely going to take your mind off the driving.
Hyundai today finally unveiled its eagerly awaited "Hyundai Veloster coupe "at the 2011 North American International Auto Show, aka the Detroit show. We first saw the Veloster as a concept car at the 2007 Seoul motor show.
The Hyundai Coupe slid quietly off sale in 2009, and the Veloster - promised in concept form a couple of years ago - fires the Koreans back into the semi-sporting market. We'll get the new Veloster in Europe, too.
The architecture underpinning the new Veloster is all Hyundai i30. A twin-clutch transmission - Hyundai's first - is also available.
Interestingly, unlike Mini's oddball Clubman, Hyundai has engineered the solitary rear door for left- and right-hand drive. The door handle on the single rear door is cleverly hidden, maintaining the coupe silhouette.
'This exciting car offers progressive buyers a sleek and distinctive design in an innovative three-door coupe form that provides practicality as well as driving pleasure.
