The IT Nerd

The 2018 Hyundai Elantra GT Sport Ultimate is a small car packed with a lot of technology in it. Let’s start with the safety aspects of the vehicle:

• It has blind spot monitoring and rear cross traffic alerts. The former is great because it doesn’t just warn you about vehicles in your blind spot, but it generates those warnings based on the speed and relative distance of the vehicle in your blind spot. That adds an extra layer of safety. The latter makes sure that you don’t crash your Elantra GT Sport into anything or anyone when you are backing out of a space at Home Depot and big pick up trucks are obscuring your view.
• Headlights are of the LED variety which are not only very bright and fill the road with usable light, but also have a feature called high beam assist which flips the high beams on automatically on dark roads, and turns them off automatically when the car senses oncoming traffic.
• It has a back up camera with excellent clarity and a great range of vision. It also has lines on the screen to help you to position your car when backing into a parking space or parallel parking. However, I will note that sensors to warn you when you might be coming too close to an object are missing.
• You get a very advanced cruise control system that adapts to traffic conditions in a couple of ways. Not only will it slow down and speed up relative to the car in front of you, it is also capable of dealing with stop and go traffic to the point that it will come to a complete stop and then start itself up again. Once I learned to trust the system, I found it to be very handy in terms of dealing with the traffic that the highways of Toronto tends to have.
• You get autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian detection which will bring the Elantra GT Sport to a stop if it detects a car or a person in front of it, and you take no action to avoid said car or person.
• You get a lane departure warning system which not only warns you when you drift out of your lane, but it’s capable of automatically guiding you back into your lane by correcting your steering for you. The system has three settings and when set to normal, I found the system to be subtle when correcting my steering to the point that I wouldn’t notice it if I were not looking for it to be doing its job.
• The Elantra GT Sport also monitors how you drive the car and suggests when you should take a break. This is very handy in avoiding driver fatigue on long drives. I’ve reviewed cars with this feature, but never at this price point. Thus this is a bit of a game changer.
• Seven airbags are standard including driver’s knee airbag.

The only thing that is missing from all this safety tech is tire pressure monitoring. While not required here in Canada, it is odd in 2017 to see a car without it.

The Elantra GT Sport also comes with a lot of technology to make life easier for you:

• Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are included along with Hyundai’s own navigation and infotainment system. They’re all displayed on an 8″ screen which is extremely sharp and viewable in all lighting conditions. The key thing about this is that Hyundai has given drivers the choice of three different systems that allow them to use the infotainment system in the way that fits them. Plus any car company that doesn’t have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is going lose sales in this day and age. One thing that I noticed was that the infotainment system was significantly faster than ones in other Hyundai products that I’ve tried recently.
• There’s a seven speaker Infinity audio system that sounds great. Everything from The Pet Shop Boys to Origa sounded great on this stereo.
• Besides having a USB connector for your phone, there’s a wireless charger that uses the Qi standard. That means that any Android phone that supports wireless charging, or the new iPhone 8 or iPhone X will work with the wireless charger.

But the key piece of technology that you should be aware of is BlueLink which is new from Hyundai Canada and it’s making its first appearance in the Hyundai Elantra Sport GT. It’s a cutting edge telematics system that gives you everything from remotely starting the car from an app on your smartphone, local search, checking on the health of your car, to automatic dialing of emergency services if you get into an accident. I did an In Depth repot on BlueLink here and I encourage you to read it so that you can see how useful BlueLink is. Another data point is that America’s version of BlueLink was ranked by Consumers Reports as the number 2 telematics system that’s out there. I fully expect that Hyundai Canada’s version will rank just as high if not higher. It’s free for five years and once you see it, you’ll want it in your Elantra Sport GT.

The final part of this review will tie up some loose ends and I’ll give you my closing thoughts on this hot hatch. Stay tuned for that tomorrow.

This entry was posted on September 21, 2017 at 9:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Hyundai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.