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Hyundai Kona Hits Aussie Roads.
Hyundai has joined the burgeoning small SUV family with the addition of the Kona, a sharp looking machine with a front end that is sure to raise eyebrows. New Kona will be available in three trim levels, Kona Active, Kona Elite and Kona Highlander, with an optional safety pack for Active (‘Active with Safety Pack’).
Engine.
You’ll have a choice of a 2.0-litre, 110 kilowatt/180 Nm naturally-aspirated, four-cylinder engine with conventional six-speed automatic and front-wheel-drive, or a 1.6-litre Turbo-GDI with 130 kW/265 Nm between 1500 to 4500 rpm with seven-speed dual-cutch transmission (DCT) and all-wheel-drive.
The 2.0L engine accelerates the front-wheel-drive Kona from standstill to 100km/h in 10 seconds flat. The ‘Gamma’ 1.6 T-GDi has 18% more power and 47% more torque than the 2.0 litre MPi engine, giving a 7.9 second 0-100km/h time.
The turbo engine is mated to Hyundai’s efficient and responsive seven-speed, dual-clutch transmission (DCT) which combines the fuel efficiency of a manual transmission with the ease and convenience of an automatic. Economy is quoted as 7.2L and 6.7L per 100 kilometres.
Body.
Kona will offer nine body colour choices and two roof colours. The rear echoes the Tucson and Santa Fe (and the front of the Kona) whilst the front has hints of Jeep Cherokee thanks to LED driving lights at the bonnet line, headlines in a slightly unusually shaped cluster at mid grille and globe driving lights centrally located at the bottom of the front bar. Profile wise it’s a long bonneted look, flared guards, a curved rear, with the driver pretty much centrally located. Hyundai have used an innovative manufacturing process, with AHSS or Advanced High Strength Steel, making the body more rigid yet 10 perent light than using conventional steel panels. There’s also metal adhesive, 114 metres of it, to supplement conventional building processes.
Dimensions.
It’s compact, for sure, at 4165 mm in length, 1800 mm in width, 1565 mm in height, and rides on a wheelbase of 2600 mm. Ground clearance is a minimum of 170 mm. Although it’s smallish, Hyundai have put some TARDIS inside, with front shoulder room of 1410 mm, leg room of 1054 mm, and head room of 1005 mm. Rear seat passengers will have no issues either. Boot space is a minimum of 361 litres.
Equipment and Suspension.
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are on board, Forward Collision-Avoidance Assist (FCA) with Pedestrian Detection, plus Drive Mode Select is available on both automatic and DCT variants, the function letting drivers choose between ‘Comfort’, ‘Eco’ and ‘Sport’ modes. Blind Spot Colliosion Warning is active up to thirty kph, and there’s Rear Cross Traffic Collision Warning. On board will also be a Lane Keeping Assist package with Departure Warning.
Underneath there’s the tried and proven MacPherson strut front suspension, and a torsion beam or multi-link rear depending on using front wheel or all awheel drive. There’s also a variety of suspension tunes depending on which variant you buy. During testing, 13 and 29 front and rear shock absorbers for the all wheel drive system, and 13 & 29 for the front wheel drive, two different stabiliser bars, and three & two spring sets were trialled to provide the best balanced deemed suitable for both country and city driving.
Pricing.
Current pricing is set to start at $27000.
Saudi Women Get The Right To Drive
The really big news in the motoring world of the past week or so isn’t GM’s plans for electric vehicles or the plans afoot for a Rolls-Royce SUV (although these are both hot issues). It’s the fact that at long last, the Saudi ban on women getting their drivers’ license has been lifted.
Up until now, Saudi Arabia has been alone in not permitting women to drive legally – even other countries operating under Shariah (Muslim or Islamic) law such as Qatar, Iran and Iraq let women drive legally (the only other country that prohibited women from driving was Afghanistan under the Taliban). Some of the reasons given included the possibility of women mixing with unrelated males (which goes against the cultural/religious norms) in the case of a traffic accident and the fact that driving can’t be done in a full burqa (although it can be done in a headscarf that’s pulled back where it doesn’t block peripheral vision much – as Western women in the 1920s knew well). 
The ban was lifted after a very long and determined campaign, mostly conducted via social media, by a group of Saudi women, who faced all sorts of possible penalties and repercussions for doing so, including one who was sentenced to a flogging for trying to drive until the King stepped in and overturned the sentence.
The ban was finally lifted on the grounds that constantly paying for taxis was putting a huge drain on the resources of many families; the rule about gender segregation was being broken left, right and centre because all the taxi drivers were men not related to their passengers; and women were finding it hard to get jobs and education, in spite of the Saudi government wanting to push tertiary education. As of September 26, Saudi women can now get their licenses.
OK, so what’s the big deal? Well, for one thing, female tourists can drive themselves around. Previously, if you had got your license overseas, you could still only drive in Saudi Arabia if you were issued with a local license… and they didn’t hand these out to women. A good chunk of us don’t have Saudi Arabia on our list of holiday destinations (barring those of us who want to make pilgrimages to Mecca for religious reasons), so why should we care over here in Australia?
We should care because it should make us stop and think for a moment about the freedoms we have here, and be grateful that we are allowed to get our drivers’ licences so easily (comparatively easily anyway!).
Do you remember the feeling of finally being grown up when you first got your L-plates, to say nothing of the feeling of independence and freedom when you got your P-plates and finally your full licence? You could go anywhere and do anything (almost) without having to sit down and negotiate timetables and the intricacies of working out who had to do what, where and when to ensure that Mum’s Taxi Service ran smoothly. You could also do your bit like a real adult when you could drive yourself to a proper job, and you felt like something of a hero/heroine who saved the day when you got a text from Dad saying that he had locked his keys in the car and needed you to drive over with the spares, or when you were able to drive your little brothers and sisters to school when Mum was sick and couldn’t do it.
Now imagine that you weren’t able do all that. And that you still couldn’t do it, even if you were an educated and intelligent capable adult with kids of your own and a proper job. Your choice of “proper jobs” would be really limited to what was within walking distance of the nearest bus stop, because if you had to pay for a taxi twice a day every day, the drain on your wallet would just about make it not worth working. And all this time, half of the members of your family do have the freedom to drive anywhere at any time, and you have to depend on their goodwill to go where you want or need to go. This situation will go on all your life.
You also have to depend on this small handful of other family members if your children need to be picked up after school, have got sports practice or if they need to get to the dentist… or the doctor. Keep your fingers crossed that your kids never need a trip to the emergency room with something that isn’t life threatening enough to warrant calling an ambulance (e.g. broken arms, saucepans wedged onto heads, sprained ankles, etc.) during the daytime when the family members with the licenses are away on business or out doing their own thing. Any doctor’s appointments, shopping trips even for basic groceries and visits to the dental clinic have to fit in with other people’s work schedules as well as your own. It’s Dad’s Taxi every time, with Mum’s Taxi not existing, which is annoying and stressful for Dad as well as for Mum.
Take a few moments right now to think about how your life would be different if your mum couldn’t drive, or your sister, or your wife (or yourself, if you’re a woman).
To take things to real extremes, if women didn’t or couldn’t drive cars, then the automotive industry might never have got off the ground in the first place. Karl Benz was on the point of giving up his experiment with the horseless carriage and was despairing that it would ever catch on, but then Bertha Benz loaded the kids into the new car and drove off to visit her mum as a publicity stunt to show that this new-fangled invention was so simple that even a woman could drive it with ease.
It’s also a good to take time to appreciate the fact that we can get licenses. Even if you live in the city and can commute by foot, bike or public transport, or if you work from home in a telecommute, be sure to get your licence, because you never know what the future might hold or when you’ll need to drive. Learn to drive and get that licence, and encourage your daughters to enjoy cars and driving just as much as you teach your sons.
Private Fleet Car Review: 2018 Peugeot 3008 GT.
There have been times when a car maker undertakes a wholesale change to a vehicle and receives deafening silence. This is certainly not the case with Peugeot’s revamped 3008 range. How’s winning the European Car of the Year Award for 2017 sound? To find out if it is worth the fuss, Private Fleet goes one on one with the range topping Peugeot 3008 GT diesel.
Clad in a pearl paint called Ultimate Red (a $1050 option), the 3008 GT comes with a 2.0L diesel and EAT6 (Efficient Automatic Transmission six speed) gearbox. The test vehicle starts at $49490 and was fitted with a strongly patterned leather seat trim ($2700), Electronic Tailgate (with foot operation) plus Panoramic Sunroof ($2500) for a RRP of $55740.
Sizewise it fits nicely into the mid sized SUV family. It’s a compact 4447 mm long, rides on a 2675 mm wheelbase, and has an overall width of just under 1900 mm. What this buys you is over 1450 mm of hip and shoulder room for the front seat passengers, and just a few mm less for the rear seats. There’s also plenty of leg room as well; what this all means for a buyer is an astonishing amount of comfort and freedom whilst being cosseted by the superbly padded and supportive seats. The pattern is, as one wag mentioned, the same as what you’d find being worn by a Game of Thrones character…not that that’s a bad thing.
The front seats are heated and warm up quickly, but not quickly enough on a cold Sydney day. However, like so many leather seats, they’re not ventilated for cooling, and get somewhat sticky and uncomfortable on a warm day. That’s about the only negative on the seats as they look absolutely sensational with the thick quilted weave pattern and stitching. The front seats are, as you’d expect for a top of the tree model, electrically operated and have thigh extensions, and the second row seats are 60/40 split fold for the 591L/1670L rear cargo section.
The office space is a wonderful place to be when it comes to driving the 3008 GT. The diesel pumps out a handy peak of 133 kilowatts at 3750 and an immensely useable 400 Nm of peak torque at 2000 rpm. Peugeot quotes a 0-100 kph time of 8.9 seconds, but the pucker-metre says quicker. Economy is quoted as 7.0L/100 km combined, with PF seeing closer to 8.0L/100 km in an urban oriented drive. The dry weight of the 3008 GT helps, being 1371 kilos. Compare that to a couple of direct competitors such as the CX-5 2.5L at 1565 kg or Hyundai’s Tucson 1.6L turbo, with 1683 kilos…
There’s enough on tap to have, in spite of the electronic nanny systems cars have nowadays, a chirp from the front driven Continental ContiSportContact 235/50/19 rubber. Rolling acceleration is truly an experience and that 400 Nm really shows its mettle plus you’ll find yourself quickly on the high side of the legal limit if you’re not watching the numbers. The transmission, once it hooks up, is superb. It’ll grab the torque and power and shove that through the ratios to the driven wheels without a hiccup.
Note the caveat there: “once it hooks up”. The EAT6 gearbox exhibits the worst characteristics of a DCT (Dual Clutch Transmission) when cold and at idling speeds. There’s gaps between selecting Drive and Reverse when barely rolling, and a gap in actually engaging Drive from Reverse whilst in Reverse. It’s possibly the only part of the 3008, however, that doesn’t work that well. The gear selection lever itself is fighter jet inspired as there’s an electronic tab on the top to select Park and a separate tab for Reverse/Neutral/Drive via the right hand side of the lever.
Also noteworthy is that there was no AWD option available for the GT. The reason for this is surprisingly simple: market research indicated that the higher echelon models such as the GT would rarely, if ever, see anything other than tarmac, in opposition to the entry level models, which research indicated would be more likely for some soft-roading.
It’s appropriate that Peugeot have used a jet style like gear selector, as the cabin itself for the front seat duo is deliberate in having a cockpit like feel (and it’s literally called the i-Cockpit) for the driver and a clear delineation between that and the passenger seat. The centre console rises nicely on the passenger side and sweeps upwards and around to the right towards the steering column. Along the way it houses a number of switches in two horizontal rows, marking one line out for the heated seats and front & rear window defrosting and the other specifically for the audio, navigation, Blutooth, apps and such.
The trim itself is a beautiful mix of alloy look plastic, subtly textured matt black plastic, and alcantara splitting the dash horizontally. The upper section has a leather like material and houses both the touchscreen and the driver’s display, a wonderfully engineered full colour LCD screen. There’s a roller dial on the steering wheel, (itself a work of art) which is set BELOW the screen and works well ergonomically by the way, that allows you to choose different preprogrammed looks to the screen. It’s elegant, classy, and simply gorgeous to look at. As is, by the way, the LED mood lighting and the wing mirror puddle lamp.
There is a slight downside to all of this and unfortunately it’s front and centre visually. Where the touchscreen sits in the dash it looks rather like a super sharp knife has been used to cut out a slot and the screen’s been dropped in. No it doesn’t look all that good and detracts somewhat from the otherwise gentleman’s club atmosphere the cabin has. The touchscreen has a hidden attraction though. Poke it (gently) with three fingers and the embedded programming reads that as a “page back”. Another delight was the inclusion of digital radio, and it is a punchy, clear, well setup sound system.
However, there’s plenty of other tech to play with such as the wireless charging plate in its own little nook directly underneath the tabs. You’ll also have lane departure warning, a 360 degree camera setup on board as well, providing an extra peace of mind and safety element, plus Active Safety Brake and Distance Alert System when using cruise control (and it flashes up on the driver’s screen when nosing up towards traffic ahead of you). The foot operrated tailgate is simple in concept. The idea is to wave your foot (either one, it’s not fussy) underneath the rear bumper where a sensor reads the movement and pops the door upwards. In practice it was finicky and not always successful.
Transmission hiccups aside, the 3008 GT is, perhaps, the best riding mid sized SUV you can get. Imagine, if you will, those nineteen inch wheels and 50 series rubber being able to follow every bump and lump, every ripple and corrugation, every undulation, and transmit those through to you in the cabin BUT not make that ride unduly harsh or painful but rather a fluid, almost liquid, experience.
The light weight helps in the agility stakes too, meaning there’s less mass to move in directional changes (and haul up under brakes). There’s little to no road noise transmitted to the passengers, but the feeling of control, of comfort, of being swept along on a magic carpet. The steering ratio is spot on, meaning there’s no wasted movement in the way the wheel turns and relates to the front wheels. It’s beautifully weighted and is neither over or under assisted.
Outside the 3008 has been given a complete makeover from the 3007. It’s still rounded and ovoid but now with a more angular, edgy appearance, especially at the front and in profile around the C pillar. There’s even subtle differences between the GT and the others in the range. Here you get a more prominent “claw” motif in the tail lights, which themselves stand proud of the sheetmetal. The rear quarter is now a slightly busy looking mix of lines and angles, with the D pillar or tail gate blacked out between the chrome hip line and alloy look roof like (part of the paint option pack).
There’s a solid line of black polyurethane from the rear to front, wrapping the wheel arches but doesn’t cover the seam line of the body underneath the doors. The front is assertive, bluff and upright, with the “chin” an alloy look and the lower right extremity open to cool the radiators fitted behind. Even the LED headlights are angular with a strongly defined “shark fin” design element to broaden the visual appeal.
Warranty wise Peugeot offers three years or 100000 kilometres which does lag behind competitors now offering five or even seven years. However the included roadside assist is ahead of the game by offering that as three years, not one. There’s even a specialised capped price servicing program in place here:Peugeot Capped Price Service Program
At The End Of The Drive.
There are those, unfortunately, that will swear on the grave of their grandmother’s budgie’s second cousin that SUVs still have no right to be on our roads and we should go back to station wagons if we want to move people around. The 3008 GT and its brethren stand up for those that say the SUV has a worthy place in the automotive market. Winning a COTY award and being the first ever SUV to do speaks volumes for what really is a sensational car. It’s a cracker drive, a great handler, and a bucketload of fun. Check it out for yourself here: 2018 Peugeot 3008
ACCC Industry Findings: A World of Shared Data
The ACCC recently released a series of findings pertaining to the Australian automotive industry. Among these findings were observations concerning the resolution of new car buyers’ complaints, fuel efficiency and emissions tests, as well as sharing manufacturer data with independent mechanics and body shops. While each of these topics is contentious in its own right, the last of these, shared vehicle data, should have relevance to just about every stakeholder in the industry.
Looking at the ACCC’s observations more closely, the consumer watchdog is advocating for repair and body shop members of the Motor Trades Association of Australia to receive current vehicle data from all manufacturers, so that they may also carry out work on vehicles.
These changes would obviously open up repair and services work to a wider market, thus reducing business for dealerships. Currently there is a voluntary arrangement in place, which has been limited in its success due to a lack of consistency and timeliness in sharing such info. As such, the ACCC is pushing for a mandatory arrangement. The provision of this digital data on a compulsory basis would not be without costs however, as receiving parties would be expected to pay for access to this information.
There is also scope in the recommendations for independent repair businesses to receive faster access to OEM parts. Again, on a commercial basis but with some provisions for restrictions based on security. The price of said parts is also flagged as an issue, with prices said to be rising and dealers able to leverage discounts. Although policy on all of the issues has not been addressed, public consultation has been earmarked as necessary.
Naturally, while public consultation is a fair and transparent process, the ACCC should be forthright in pushing what is a much needed agenda for change. For too long now new car buyers have been confined in their choices as a consumer with respect to servicing or repairing their vehicle. Even if there hasn’t been a formal restriction in place, motorists have felt compelled to take their vehicle back to a dealer for servicing.
In turn, this has led to motorists forking out a considerably greater deal to maintain their car than would otherwise be the case. They are in part wearing the cost of a lack of competition, while ultimately, dealerships have been able to recoup significant margins that were otherwise diminishing by way of lower retail car prices and record low interest rates. Also, what cannot be overlooked is the impact, from a safety perspective, this has had when consumers opt instead to refrain from repairing or servicing their vehicles as would be necessary.
On the other side of the equation, the consumer watchdog also views customer loyalty as hindered and points to the lack of a “level playing field” caused by the current state of affairs. For a healthy market to exist, it’s important that participants are all afforded opportunities to access the same customers. Of course, barring patents, IP or legal restrictions. These changes are just the beginning of facilitating reforms that will restore balance within the industry and better serve customers and mechanics.
Level 2, 9 Help Street