Junior was making a show of luxuriating in the heated rear seats and Dad was eyeballing the backup camera view to ease into a spot.
Heated back seats? Rearview camera? In an "economy car"?
Yes, if it's the redesigned 2011 Hyundai Elantra compact. The high-end test car featuring those premium items had a window-sticker price of $22,110.
For that, you also got perforated leather upholstery, XM satellite radio, proximity key with push-button start, 17-inch diameter alloy wheels, sunroof — an upscale vehicle that happened to have a compact size and price.
Not that twenty-two grand is dirt-cheap, but nowadays, it's better than reasonable for a car equipped as the tester was.
Too much stuff and money for you? You can drop all the way to $15,550 for the bare bones Elantra GLS with manual gearbox and no air conditioning.
Elantra, remade from the ground up less than 41/2 years after the previous generation was launched in the U.S., is arguably Hyundai's most important vehicle. It's the hard-charging South Korean car company's weapon in the ever-fiercer compact-sedan market, against such marquee troops as Honda Civic and Ford Focus, both with redesigns due this spring.
The compact market, already the second-best-selling category after midsize sedans, is expected to boom as tightening federal fuel-economy rules all but dictate smaller, lighter cars with smaller engines. Too, there's a sense among car companies — not necessarily shared by industry analysts — that Americans crave smaller, cheaper vehicles to better suit their budgets and assuage eco-guilt.
There were no bare-bones Elantras available at the Philadelphia-area test session, but a midlevel GLS with automatic transmission was just as satisfying to drive and comfortable as the high-end Limited Premium model.
Hyundai has applied the midsize Sonata's sweeping look to the compact Elantra, and the smaller car wears it surprisingly well. Often, such dramatic styling doesn't scale down well, looking stubby and truncated. Elantra escapes that.
The interior felt roomier than expected, and the rear seat comfortably holds adults, attributes that soften the main objections to small cars.
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