Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Best of the Bay (Part 2): Lexus vs Hyundai

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Best of the Bay (Part 2): Lexus vs Hyundai · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing, technology sales rep, that turned
• 0:06
  into a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:32
  Good day, good morning, good afternoon.
• 0:35
  It is John Summers, the motoring historian.
• 0:37
  So in this episode, I road tested some new cars.
• 0:40
  It was a couple of months ago now.
• 0:42
  I've only just edited together into something constructive, but you know,
• 0:45
  here are my thoughts on some new cars.
• 0:48
  So my 9am on the Tuesday morning was the Lexus GS550.
• 0:54
  I think the information said it was the premium plus.
• 0:57
  At the end of the day, when I'd driven all the other cars, I came back to the
• 1:03
  Lexus and I touched the steering wheel and I touched the shift lever just to remind
• 1:07
  myself what did the material really feel that much nicer than the other stuff that
• 1:14
  I'd driven, specifically the Genesis, which were about the same price point.
• 1:17
  The answer is yes.
• 1:19
  If you go to the dealership, either with a significant other, or if you
• 1:24
  yourself walk out of there thinking these Lexus guys, they're building to
• 1:28
  a higher quality than Genesis, or I want that it's worth paying the premium
• 1:33
  to have the Lexus over the Toyota.
• 1:36
  Uh, yes.
• 1:36
  Yes, this GS550 definitely conveyed that feeling of absolute quality.
• 1:45
  And I, uh, I want to apologize to the Lexus because I didn't
• 1:50
  mention them in the comments.
• 1:51
  And I really should have mentioned that really, if the Genesis
• 1:56
  stuff was very ostentatious and nouveau riche, and I loved it.
• 2:00
  but that grill is very big.
• 2:02
  The Lexus is everything that those Genesis GVs was, but with so much more
• 2:09
  subtlety and the touch points, you know, they were actually the Genesis
• 2:14
  has lovely seats, but the touch points of the Lexus, Oh, just so nice.
• 2:18
  And our car was dark green and that was so nice.
• 2:21
  And it was just lovely to drive.
• 2:25
  And, and I, uh, At one point, I put it half off the road and, and I
• 2:30
  realized if I just carried on driving forward, there was like a earth bank.
• 2:33
  So I just did that to be like, how is it going to cope with that?
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  And it just drove up it as easily as, you know, a normal car would drive
• 2:40
  up, you know, not a high kerb, but a low kerb, you know, it just went boink
• 2:44
  up it, you know, no problem at all.
• 2:46
  Like.
• 2:47
  Very, very impressive and this is going to be perverse, but right size, right?
• 2:52
  Not too big, not too wide, not too long can fit in normal
• 2:57
  sized American parking spaces.
• 3:00
  And it's a bit like when you're choosing schools for your kid.
• 3:02
  And when somebody says to you, think about the commute.
• 3:05
  And you're like, what on earth?
• 3:06
  I want little Johnny to, you know, get the best teachers he possibly can.
• 3:10
  I'm going to make a judgment on that.
• 3:12
  And then you're like, Oh yeah, if the commute is 15 minutes, that means I'm
• 3:18
  spending an hour a day in the car.
• 3:19
  Cause if the commute is a half an hour, that means I'm spending
• 3:23
  two hours day in the car.
• 3:25
  Huge difference, huge difference, huge.
• 3:30
  But at first you don't perceive that, and of course that reflects on the
• 3:34
  kid because the kid hates sitting in the car, and if you're bad tempered,
• 3:37
  you know, it all spins off, right?
• 3:38
  So in other words, that commute, that is a significant factor, and
• 3:43
  the relevant comparison here with the Lexus is that that size thing.
• 3:49
  That's the, the three row SUV.
• 3:51
  They can be too big.
• 3:53
  They can feel too big.
• 3:54
  You can feel like, you know, excursion, you can feel, I wanna add that.
• 3:58
  F two 50 in Santa Monica, you know, a current F two 50 is just too big, right?
• 4:03
  You could, you know, in the BMW you can fit down this car street with parked
• 4:07
  cars, with another car coming in an F two 50, you can't, and you just have
• 4:12
  to be patient and it's annoying and you wonder why you're driving such a behemoth.
• 4:17
  in city streets.
• 4:18
  And this Lexus did not leave me feeling like that.
• 4:22
  It felt it was right sized.
• 4:24
  Bloody cool.
• 4:25
  So what else did I write down?
• 4:26
  Great throttle response.
• 4:28
  Two screens.
• 4:29
  Weird instruments.
• 4:31
  These, these moderns have a lot of screens.
• 4:34
  And this is the first car I drove.
• 4:35
  So I was probably coming to terms at the moment, at that time with, you know,
• 4:39
  the fact that it had any screens at all.
• 4:41
  Yeah.
• 4:42
  Yeah.
• 4:42
  Couldn't find the heater.
• 4:44
  It was cold, so the rep had put the heater on, and it was nice when I first got in
• 4:48
  here, but then I couldn't turn it down.
• 4:50
  So I kept opening the windows to cool down and then putting it back
• 4:53
  up again, because I just didn't know how to access the infotainment thing.
• 4:57
  Now this is what's hard about assessing the cars, because
• 5:01
  that was clearly user error.
• 5:04
  I'm sure it has a really easy way to access the heater system.
• 5:09
  I just have, like, a left handed, cack handed Blood I, you know,
• 5:16
  I just didn't learn how, just put the window down instead.
• 5:19
  I rode so chuckable, the car shrinks around you.
• 5:23
  Did feel like a car, didn't feel like a, felt nothing like a body on frame SUV.
• 5:30
  My last two comments were, but where are the fucking heater controls?
• 5:34
  Why the big pointless screen, and then separately, love the giddyup.
• 5:39
  Yeah, and I did love the giddyup.
• 5:41
  So, all around great car, marred only by the tester's ineptitude and inability
• 5:47
  to find the, uh, the heater controls.
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  And I should say, you know, I drove it on the back of having this Toyota
• 5:52
  truck, and, and the truck keeps on doing what it says on the tin.
• 5:56
  You know, it just works.
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  Which is all I wanted to do.
• 5:59
  This Lexus had that feel about it.
• 6:01
  You know, there's no like, it's not showy.
• 6:04
  The styling apes land cruisers, but it just has that sort of retro feel.
• 6:11
  It's, it's, there's nothing actually retro about it.
• 6:15
  The overall experience is very modern, very clean, very usable, very
• 6:20
  luxurious because of those materials.
• 6:22
  It was a very high bar.
• 6:25
  That first vehicle set I felt.
• 6:38
  So the next vehicle I drove was the Kia Sorento, which is, uh,
• 6:44
  like an SUV, I guess, like a Honda CRV, like RAV4 size SUV.
• 6:52
  I wrote, the first thing I wrote was lovely inside to look at.
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  Now the feel was definitely not Lexus, the feel of the materials, but the look.
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  It's so much closer to something really nice like that Lexus
• 7:08
  than you would ever expect.
• 7:09
  Now the price point here, we were high fifties for this guy.
• 7:13
  So is there a noticeable difference between the 71 for the Lexus and the
• 7:17
  high fifties for, for this nicely appointed Sorento, Kia Sorento?
• 7:21
  Yes.
• 7:22
  Yes.
• 7:23
  Now this weird, like hybrid EV were the whole time, which, which I didn't like.
• 7:30
  It's just something that the Kia's had that, interestingly,
• 7:34
  the Genesis didn't have.
• 7:35
  And it's that the screens were curved slightly.
• 7:39
  I just want to talk about the screens, actually.
• 7:41
  You know, when I say they're curved, a little bit like the way
• 7:44
  a Sierra's dashboard used to be, if you can remember a Ford Sierra.
• 7:48
  Um, you know, in the, the, it just bends a little bit towards the
• 7:52
  driver and they were rounded off.
• 7:54
  In the Genesis, they weren't curved, they were rectangular and they weren't.
• 7:58
  They curve towards you and they weren't rounded off in, in, in the same way.
• 8:02
  And, uh, I, I thought on the Kia, the rounding off and the curve
• 8:06
  towards the driver, I thought that was a really kind of elegant touch.
• 8:10
  Both of them did quite a good job at putting, making the screens unobtrusive,
• 8:15
  that having done the back to back to back to back driving of these cars, sort
• 8:19
  of speed dating of cars, if you will.
• 8:22
  Having done that.
• 8:23
  I appreciate more and more how some makers have listened to what people
• 8:30
  have said about not liking screens and not wanting everything to be buried
• 8:37
  deep in drop down menus a la Tesla.
• 8:40
  And, and now what we do is we don't have these big, like, tablet
• 8:43
  embedded on the screen, like, tablet embedded on the dashboard.
• 8:46
  Hey, footnotes.
• 8:47
  We seem to be moving towards these sort of two or three inch high,
• 8:52
  sometimes more, sometimes four or five.
• 8:53
  But these instrument displays that are sort of around, like, below your eye line.
• 9:00
  And a lot of these cars were doing the Honda, which I didn't really The
• 9:04
  Acura, rather, that I didn't have.
• 9:06
  ZDX is the model, by the way.
• 9:07
  I didn't really have much to say about it.
• 9:09
  It didn't leave much of an impression on me in comparison to some of
• 9:12
  the other vehicles that I drove.
• 9:13
  But that ZDX, the one thing that was noticeable about that was the
• 9:17
  heads up display worked really well.
• 9:19
  A number of them had heads up.
• 9:20
  Some of them it was distracting.
• 9:21
  Some of them it wasn't bright enough.
• 9:23
  I didn't notice it until the end.
• 9:24
  I dare say you can adjust to all that stuff, but, you know,
• 9:27
  that's just the experience as it was, uh, as it was dealt with.
• 9:30
  To, to me, but look right through the suitcase.
• 9:33
  Sorrento had that.
• 9:33
  So did the Keir Carnival, the minivan that was going to talk about next.
• 9:37
  So the content, awesome.
• 9:39
  The, the actual touch and feel, you know, not so, not quite so impressive.
• 9:44
  At freeway speeds, it was still responsive, right, which is the hybrid
• 9:48
  thing, but it really felt luxurious.
• 9:51
  It was very quiet at those kind of freeway speeds, and it
• 9:56
  felt as if it could go beyond.
• 9:59
  Allegedly, other people, not me, allegedly it did well at much higher
• 10:04
  speeds than you would expect a mid priced minivan to cope with.
• 10:08
  So yeah, so that was a pretty impressive piece of kit, there was
• 10:11
  just the annoying whirr all the time.
• 10:13
  Didn't like that.
• 10:14
  Now, the Kia Carnival's the minivan and it did not have that same annoying whirr.
• 10:19
  It was in a nice grey colour.
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  That was the one that had the head up display that I found annoying.
• 10:25
  Maybe I just needed to adjust the brightness.
• 10:28
  The gas motor was loud when it cut in.
• 10:31
  That was another comment that I made.
• 10:33
  The trunk lid was super.
• 10:35
  Like the load bed was like low, below the level of where the seats were mounted,
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  like the normal floor, if you like.
• 10:42
  I guess because the hybrid or whatever.
• 10:45
  The design of it, for space wise, was just, you know, what MPVs always are,
• 10:50
  but next generation all around that.
• 10:52
  You know, that was That was impressive.
• 10:55
  The other thing that I wrote was that it was surprisingly planted
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  in high speed sweeping turns.
• 11:01
  And this is what a coast road allowed.
• 11:03
  I didn't think I'd taken it out along the coast road because I, I, that was when
• 11:08
  I, one of the first drives that I did.
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  And that was when I realized that the forest route wasn't going to be any good.
• 11:13
  And I got out of it at the top of the hill and had a like, like a look around.
• 11:17
  And you know, I would say that I didn't do that with all the cars, but with.
• 11:21
  Both of these keyers, the fit and finish, bloody awesome.
• 11:25
  The panel fit, the quality of the paint.
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  I mean, I'm no paint inspector.
• 11:30
  I just like to look round and you know, you just feel like the overall standard,
• 11:35
  you feel like the overall standard is so much higher than it ever used to be.
• 11:52
  Billing got some of that tequila I was talking about earlier, and it's
• 11:55
  invigorated me to talk on about the, uh, next couple of cars that I drove.
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  So, it's now sort of midway through the first morning of cars, and you now
• 12:06
  know the route off by heart, you know.
• 12:08
  Worrying about, should I be turning this way or that way?
• 12:11
  You know where you need to be going and you can really focus on just,
• 12:15
  you know, making the most of, uh, of the cars rather than feeling like
• 12:20
  half an hour, wasn't enough time.
• 12:22
  It was never like half an hour was enough.
• 12:24
  I was like too much time, but it definitely became easier as the day
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  went on to get the car back at exactly the right time and feel like you'd
• 12:32
  actually experienced it completely.
• 12:34
  One thing I did regret was I used.
• 12:37
  I did the IONIQ 5N, which is the performance version of like the
• 12:42
  triangle IONIQ 5, Hyundai IONIQ 5, um, which is really quite an
• 12:46
  interesting product to look at.
• 12:48
  Anyway, it's the most, for me, it's the most interesting interpretation of
• 12:52
  the whole, like, how do you do an SUV?
• 12:55
  It's the most interesting interpretation of that, outside of, of something like
• 13:00
  the, In comparison to the Ferrari Purosang or something like that, which is sort
• 13:04
  of not really, uh, it is an SUV, but it doesn't really have SUV proportions.
• 13:08
  Ioniq 5 has SUV proportions, but by doing those triangles and that kind of matrix
• 13:14
  thing they've got, they've created.
• 13:17
  Uh, sort of citron cactus, like completely different looking and feeling kind of
• 13:23
  product and like the Scion XB or, you know, that kind of thing that can really
• 13:28
  be appealing and can be compelling.
• 13:30
  Hyundai's N brand is.
• 13:32
  Compelling.
• 13:33
  They had a couple of N branded vehicles here.
• 13:36
  We'll talk about the Elantra in a moment, but the Ioniq 5 N looked awesome.
• 13:43
  Really, really did look awesome.
• 13:46
  Little skirts.
• 13:47
  The one that we had was black.
• 13:49
  I saw one on the street just earlier today that was white and, and the black one that
• 13:53
  we had, it had sort of orange accents.
• 13:55
  It really did look good.
• 13:57
  The steering wheel looks like a gaming console steering wheel.
• 14:02
  It has this weird sort of push to pass kind of thing.
• 14:05
  And a lot of the others were really impressed with, if you put it in like the
• 14:09
  sport mode, it would shift up and shift.
• 14:12
  Down as if you were driving a stick shift when our stick shift cars, if you were
• 14:18
  driving a gas powered car with a paddle shifter, you know, it would even like do
• 14:22
  the rev match down shifts and you know, snap, crackle, and pop in the exhaust.
• 14:28
  So there's something faintly comical about that, isn't there?
• 14:31
  And it's not quite Tesla's fart mode, but it's near that kind of, it's
• 14:38
  approaching that kind of, of absurdity.
• 14:41
  There's a sort of gamifying of performance.
• 14:44
  You think about how seriously somebody like AMG or BMW's motorsport
• 14:50
  division takes performance, you know, this was, was a humorless kind
• 14:56
  of business, you know, Bentley, you know, this is a gentleman's club.
• 15:00
  This is not an environment for, you know, fart jokes or loud shell suits.
• 15:06
  And, and, uh, Ionic N is, you know, uh, the 21st century version of the 1990s.
• 15:15
  Turquoise shell suit, isn't it?
• 15:17
  It's, it's really a, a statement of the zeitgeist, which may be a little bit too
• 15:22
  much, but it's still kind of cool, even if you wouldn't really wear one yourself.
• 15:28
  So what else?
• 15:30
  What did I actually write down about it?
• 15:33
  Crap turning circle.
• 15:35
  Feels track tight.
• 15:37
  I, I wrote Impreza and put a circle around it and that was because I, I, it
• 15:41
  reminded me of the first time I drove a Subaru Impreza Turbo and I remember
• 15:47
  coming out of like a greasy uphill.
• 15:50
  Junction that was like, Oh, I was kind of turning back on myself
• 15:54
  that the T wasn't like a T.
• 15:56
  It was like, you know, um, so it was more than a 90 degree turn.
• 16:00
  And I remember this Subi because it was all wheel drive.
• 16:03
  It just like picked up at the front.
• 16:04
  And I'd never experienced that before.
• 16:07
  You know, I knew front wheel drive cars.
• 16:08
  I knew real drift cars.
• 16:10
  I never knew one that had got, you know, the benefits of both.
• 16:13
  And that's what I realized with the Subaru Impreza Ionic 5, it had
• 16:19
  that sort of feeling of absolute completeness and, and sure footedness.
• 16:25
  This was the one with the high trunk floor.
• 16:27
  It was a carnival with a low, huge trunk.
• 16:30
  It was the Ionic 5 that had the really high trunk floor.
• 16:34
  Alcantara seats.
• 16:35
  I also wrote down License Loser, um, that it walks and talks like a hot hash.
• 16:41
  Yeah, I mean, that's state of the art, super cool, hot hatch, awesome piece
• 16:46
  of kit and sub 60k, which, you know, in today's world, something that cool for
• 16:53
  sub 60k, that feels extremely good value.
• 16:57
  And that was, uh, Because I did the forest route in it and I didn't
• 17:01
  get out and drive it really fast.
• 17:04
  Maybe I shortchanged it a little bit in the overall best of the bay analysis.
• 17:09
  Maybe if I'd have done the, uh, you know, route along the coast there
• 17:14
  instead of the route up the hill, I'd have felt a little differently,
• 17:17
  uh, a little differently about it.
• 17:19
  But yeah, impressive, but.
• 17:21
  Clearly, right, an event where you're driving cars back to back over the
• 17:25
  same route, clearly you have to be comparing them one with another.
• 17:29
  And when you've got Elantra N, that you've driven straight after the Ioniq
• 17:34
  5 N, you know, mid size hatchbacks, one EV, one not, one 37 grand, one 57 grand,
• 17:42
  I was keen to compare them together.
• 17:44
  The Elantra's old school.
• 17:46
  The Elantra N is old school.
• 17:49
  cool hot hatch.
• 17:51
  It's a bit bigger than my Fiesta.
• 17:55
  It's, you know, a bit more sophisticated automatic
• 17:57
  transmission, this kind of thing.
• 17:59
  Got the same like crazy, like push to pass, like turbo shift thing,
• 18:05
  like, you know, gamification of performance at the Ioniq N. The Elantra
• 18:11
  N had something like that as well.
• 18:13
  It also has the same kind of triangular kind of styling on the door.
• 18:17
  I think it translates very well to, to the hatchback.
• 18:20
  I'd have saved myself 20 grand.
• 18:22
  I really would.
• 18:23
  I loved the Elantra N. It was, uh, fast.
• 18:28
  Only really frightening moment was, was somebody trying to pull out on me and I
• 18:34
  was going quite quickly and, and the car was, you know, in a curve and, and in a
• 18:40
  lesser car, it might have ended badly.
• 18:42
  And in that one, it handled the situation very, very well.
• 18:47
  Indeed, it was ahead of me in terms of its ability to, to
• 18:51
  cope with the situation and.
• 18:53
  Yeah, so we enjoyed that car, really appreciated it, very well designed.
• 18:58
  Although, you know, it's a young person's car, right?
• 19:01
  It's a bit sporty and, and, you know, where's my backwards
• 19:05
  baseball cap kind of thing, really?
• 19:08
  Yeah, the Elantra and Alcantara interior as well, like the engine note.
• 19:13
  On startup after the EVs and, uh, you know, what do I do to make it go?
• 19:17
  Because this is one of the interesting things about all of these cars that
• 19:20
  we drove, was that they were like different methods of transmission,
• 19:24
  you know, different methods of actually putting it in gear.
• 19:27
  And that was kind of peculiar, to be honest.
• 19:30
  You do feel it's like the 1920s where we've not yet settled on the H pattern,
• 19:34
  you know, we're just like getting there and some people you have a little lever
• 19:38
  and you toggle it up and others you push a button and you toggle it and the Fiat
• 19:42
  500 you just have these buttons on the dashboard like P for Park, D for Drive, R
• 19:48
  for Reverse, you know, just, yeah, very, uh, Simple and that's cool, but you know,
• 19:53
  but to finish up, look on the Elantra N and the Ionic 5N, which are then natural
• 20:00
  to compare the two to finish up there.
• 20:02
  One feels very much like tomorrow's product and the other feels
• 20:06
  very much like a really nice version of yesterday's product.
• 20:10
  Obviously, I'd be keen to take yesterday's.
• 20:14
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• 20:45
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