Mostly positive
The car runs fine, comfortable on long drives, has held up well under mostly city driving. Do the maintenance on schedule, it runs like a clock.
There are two issues I have with the design, I consider severe drawbacks in cold/snowy climates, which covers at least 1/3 of the US.
1) LED lights never get warm enough to let the the light housing shed snow or ice. Pair that with the design of this car's headlight housing (long, very horizontal) and you have lights that earn their well known reputation for being poor at best. This is a safety issue for sure, for 1/3 of the country.
2) The horizontal flare from the side windows to the door handles. This flair catches snow. This snow piles up and sits on the handle, filling the opening between the handle and the door panel, and sits over the lock. Seems like a bad Idea, design wise.
My third issue with the vehicle design is the window height. The bottom of the front windows are too high to comfortably rest my arm on when the windows are open (my preferred setting, weather permitting). Further, because the bottom of the window opening is so high, the height of the window opening doesn't allow me to rest my elbow on the window with my arm raised up holding on to the top of the window opening. I have short forearms, I can't rest my arm in this position at all.
My fourth issue with the vehicle design is that unless you clear all the snow off the roof and no more snow lands on the roof, any flake of snow that blows off the roof during driving, sits on the trunk lid and creeps up the rear window, obscuring view and causing a safety hazard. Only driving at highway speed will blow light snow off the trunk lid, but heavy snow will still accumulate and pile up on the back window. I believe this is due to the upturn at the rear of the trunk lid. Is Hyunday drying to create down force on an Elantra, at the cost of safety? Hahaha.
Verified Owner
