2016 Hyundai Veloster Turbo Review – Five Years Old

Although the old adage operates with impeccable accuracy where I live, near the 45th parallel, the sign of a red sky in the morning lacks the same meaning closer to the equator where winds are less likely to blow west to east.

Likewise, in vehicular terms, there are signs that hold true in most corners of the industry but fail to prognosticate with perfect consistency across the board.

Apparently, against reasonable expectations and legends painted in the eastern sky, a supremely stiff suspension, weighty steering, and a Golf GTI-like weight-to-power ratio do not automatically result in the issuance of performance car credentials.

Hooked up to a dual-clutch transmission, the 2016 Hyundai Veloster Turbo isn’t all that quick, doesn’t corner with uncommon verve, and isn’t particularly enjoyable to engage on twisty rural roads.

But the Veloster looks the part, and it’s loaded with enough equipment to embarrass many a premium car. Oh, the conundrum.

The Veloster isn’t to the Elantra what the GTI is to the Golf or the Si is to the Civic. This is Hyundai’s version of the Volkswagen Scirocco we can’t buy; the Honda CRX the CR-Z turned out not to be.

And surely style still matters. While the bulk of new car sales are produced by conventional cars that top best seller lists, cars like the Toyota Camry and Chevrolet Cruze and Nissan Sentra that prioritize function over form, there remains room in the market for cars which favor form over function.

In fact, demand for the five-year-old Veloster really hasn’t dwindled as much as you might expect for such a style-centric device. Hyundai USA is on pace to sell roughly 27,000 Velosters in 2016, down by about a fifth from its peak in 2012 but up more than 10 percent from last year. Fiat 500 sales have plunged by nearly two-thirds since 2012. Scion FR-S sales have fallen by more than half since 2013.

Headroom for adults is limited in back, but there’s no difficulty getting a couple of child seats installed back there. Visibility, admittedly impaired by a thick bar on the rear window, isn’t so bad that it’s impossible to park a car with such tidy dimensions. (The Veloster is a foot shorter than the new Elantra sedan.)

There’s also a heavy load of features available at a low price point. The $22,600 Veloster Turbo, not to be confused with Hyundai USA’s Turbo R-Spec or Turbo Rally, includes proximity access, leather seating, an eight-speaker Dimension audio system, heated front cushions, and power lumbar support. Hyundai’s $2,700 Tech Package adds navigation, automatic climate control, and a spectacular panoramic sunroof to make a handsomely equipped $25,300 hatch, or $26,500 with the dual-clutch transmission. (This Hyundai Canada-supplied car stickered at CAD $30,494.)

There’s more lag off the line than Usain Bolt will display after a night of celebrating his ninth gold medal. (It’s worsened, in the Veloster, by a few ounces of turbo lag, as well.) The whole point of dual-clutch transmissions is to prepare the engagement of the next gear for the ultimate in quick shifting. So why is the Veloster forever slurring shifts, why is it responding slowly to paddle inputs, why must it persist in a gear too high for the circumstances?

You’ll grow accustomed to the transmission’s delayed responses, I suppose. You’ll pop the shifter into sport mode, where the Veloster Turbo DCT behaves fractionally better but becomes no more intelligent, and you’ll survive.

But will your kidneys survive the first or third or seventh pothole, let alone the 17th, 70th, or 700th? Outside the car, I was sure I saw 225/40R18 Kumho Solus rubber wrapped around handsome alloy wheels. But inside the car, making my way through the city, it feels as though Hyundai forgot the rubber. And the suspension.

Few, if any, cars I’ve driven this year traversed pavement anywhere near this stiffly. It’s a problem in daily driving. It’s a bigger problem when you wish to make hasty progress on a fun road, as the Veloster busily skips around on bumps both minor and major and the steering is initially unwilling to move off center and then becomes recalcitrant in its return to center.

The Veloster Turbo’s 1.6-liter four-cylinder is punchy in the mid-range and undeniably makes the little hatch an able point-and-shoot hatchback in traffic, where you suddenly realize three lanes need to be crossed in order to get to an off-ramp on the far right side of an interstate. But if the Veloster Turbo is going to be considered a fun car, it’ll be because of the way it looks, because of the image it projects, and because of its feature count.

To Hyundai’s credit, even five years into the first-generation Veloster’s tenure, the automaker needs only to sort the suspension, steering, and shift quality in order to turn the Veloster Turbo into a bona fide hot hatch. Granted, successfully executing such a strategy likely isn’t as easy as predicting the weather on the north Atlantic.

[Images: © Timothy Cain/The Truth About Cars]

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.