Why can’t I show love for the 2024 Hyundai Kona Premium EV?

I loved the 2023 version so much I considered buying one of own. So what’s holding me back from fully embracing the new model?

Stephen Corby

3 min read

12:00AMJanuary 27, 2024

The Weekend Australian Magazine

The 2024 Hyundai Kona Premium EV

There is an enormous amount of wankery in my industry. Motoring journalists shout angrily at each other late into the night about tread shuffle and understeer – and how, with their driving talent, they could have been racing drivers, if only all the rivers of free booze and food they’d been forced to swim through hadn’t given them gout.

You could even say road testing cars is a science in the same way that masturbation is. Anyone can do it, a lot of people would enjoy it, and getting paid for it sounds slightly absurd, which might be why people, and men in particular, look at me with awe when I tell them it’s my job (awkwardly, their first question is often “Do you need an assistant?”).

And yet blinded by their self-importance – or possibly too much masturbation – the more stentorian among motoring journalists seriously believe that evaluating a car in a methodical way against its competitive set will produce an exact and scientific result, despite the fact that road testing is as clearly subjective as whether you like prawns.

I know this because sometimes I disagree with some or even all of them (including Jeremy Clarkson at times – the man has no love for Porsches, which makes me doubt his sanity) about a particular car and cussedly despise things that many love, like Teslas.

It also helps to explain why sometimes even I can’t explain why I don’t like a new vehicle, even when I assume beforehand that I will, and believe that I should.

A ‘sexier and more sci-fi version’ of the Hyundai Kona Premium EV has landed.

When Hyundai revealed the sexier and more sci-fi version of its excellent Kona Electric, I was very much looking forward to reviewing it. I had kept one of the previous versions for six months, charged it with our home solar panels and wanked on endlessly to anyone who’d listen about how wonderful it was. The new one, pictured here, shows off the modern Hyundai design language that involves making the front of all its cars look like Iron Man’s helmet, which I like a lot, and yet it also has a kind of unnecessary edginess to the rest of its features. The creases in the doors look like a kid was desperately and repeatedly trying to fold an origami crane and never quite got it. I must admit it makes me miss the cute simplicity and rounded smiliness of the old one.

Inside, things are objectively better – a bit more expensive feeling, more technologically advanced, with better screens – and yet, mysteriously, a bit harder to love.

For a start, the tech update means the Kona now beeps at you every time you exceed the speed limit, the digital version of a tut-tutting parent. Worst of all, Hyundai has added the trendy new EV gear lever, which juts out on the right-hand side of the steering wheel, which made my wife – who loved the previous Kona Electric so much she wanted to buy it – very angry indeed, because she kept mistaking it for the indicator stalk, and thus indicating to the car that she wanted to go into Neutral.

Inside the ‘objectively better’ interior of Hyundai’s Kona Premium EV.

Theoretically, scientifically and based on the numbers alone, the new Kona Electric is also better to drive. Indeed, I enjoyed it very much and would verily recommend buying one to anyone who hasn’t previously enjoyed the boyish charms of the previous model.

The problem, it seems to me, is analogous to the Star Wars films. I have been a fan for as long as I can remember being excited about things – I saw the first one four times in a cinema, which was quite a negotiating victory for a seven-year-old – and, unlike the superfans who now seem to hate all nine movies and would spit on George Lucas given the chance, I didn’t mind the most recent trilogy, even if it did replace Wookiees with Wokiees. They were brighter and shinier than the old films and I wanted to like them very much, but their newness simply wasn’t a substitute for the magic and marvel of the originals.

Now, clearly, this is not a scientific dispute, and I think film reviewing is equally as subjective as car testing, although I know plenty of people who take it more seriously. But my sense of disappointed disquiet with the new Kona Electric is not about whether it’s a better car than the old one, because I absolutely accept that it is. It’s just about me (and my wife, who really wants the old one back).

‘Based on the numbers alone, the new Kona Electric is also better to drive.’

The new Kona Electric comes with as much as 505km of range (if you go for the Extended Range model, with its 64.8kW battery offering 150kW and 255Nm), is bigger in all the ways that matter and is also now cheaper at $58,000 for the Extended Range model and $54,000 for the Standard (with 370km of range).

So I think you should ignore me and make up your own mind, because it’s possible that, after all these years, I’m going blind, or mad. Or both.