2006 Hyundai Elantra Gls on 2040-cars

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2013 Hyundai Veloster Turbo: February 2013

I just couldn't bring myself to lead this post with the image you see on the right. The winter months have not been kind to our matte gray 2013 Hyundai Veloster Turbo, and since you can't just run the thing through your local car wash, our oddly shaped little hatchback has spent more days dirty than clean. It breaks my fleet manager heart to see one of our test cars covered in schmutz so frequently, but let's be honest - the last thing anyone wants to do when it's 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside is play with a hose and spend a good amount of time hand-washing a car.
Moral of the story: If you live in a cold-weather state where you expect to get regular doses of the white stuff, matte paint probably isn't for you. Not to worry, though, as the Veloster Turbo is offered in plenty of pretty, car wash-friendly colors.
We'll have a lot more to talk about regarding the Veloster's cleanability in forthcoming updates, and we're even planning a trip to the Dr. Beasley's office - the company that created the special matte paint detailing kit for the Hyundai - to have their experts show us how it's done. For now, let's spend some time talking about what we've learned about the turbocharged hatch during its honeymoon phase here in the Autoblog Garage.

2019 Hyundai Elantra gets angular new styling, safety options

The 2019 Hyundai Elantra compact sedan has received a pretty radical refresh for a relatively conservative car. The rounded front fascia of the current model has given way to a face full of sharp corners. The headlights and fog lights are now triangles, and the grille is sharper. The headlights intersect the grille, too. There are some nice details in this new design. The base of the headlights match up with the top-most slat in the grille, and the lights intersect the grille at some of the grille's top corners. Two new creases on the hood also line up with vertical slats in the grille. The rear of the car is updated, too, if not as radically. The taillights get sharpened corners, as well as downward extensions on the outside edges. The illuminated parts are crisp zigzagging lines that match the nose. The license plate housing has been moved from the trunk lid to the bumper, and large Elantra lettering stretches across the lid. This mirrors the design of the current Sonata midsize sedan. Overall, the design changes are reasonably attractive, though they don't seem to fit especially well with the flanks of the car, which retain the softer, more organic lines of the current car. There are a number of other small updates as far as features are concerned with the Elantra. Hyundai now includes camera-based forward collision prevention, lane-keeping assist, and driver attention alert as standard equipment on the second-lowest SEL trim and above. All trim levels also get a 5-inch touchscreen as standard along with a rear-view camera and dynamic guidelines on the screen. The base SE model with a manual transmission finally gets Bluetooth and steering wheel controls, too. The top-end Limited gets an 8-speaker sound system with subwoofer, Qi wireless phone charging and Safe Exit Assist, which warns drivers of approaching cars when the door is open. What doesn't change is under the skin. The naturally aspirated 2.0-liter four-cylinder makes the same 147 horsepower as last year, and the turbocharged 1.4-liter engine still produces 128 horsepower. The 201-horsepower Elantra Sport is completely unchanged in regards to powertrain and exterior. Hyundai says that a restyled version will appear later this year. Pricing for the refreshed Hyundai Elantra has not yet been announced. It goes on sale this fall, and pricing should come just before it hits dealers. Related Video: Featured Gallery 2019 Hyundai Elantra View 36 Photos News Source: Hyundai Hyundai Economy Cars Sedan

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.