2014 Hyundai Elantra Coupe

WEST COAST EDITOR MARK VAUGHN: I love the Elantra GT, yet I don’t love this 2014 Hyundai Elantra coupe. Why is this? I should love it -- it has “…more fun-to-drive elements” than last year’s car, according to Hyundai. They added some sound insulation so it doesn’t resonate in your head like a bag of nails being dragged down the gutter. And there’s 25 more horsepower. I guess if you were stepping directly from last year’s Elantra Coupe, you would indeed be amazed at this year’s.

But I didn’t step directly from last year’s Elantra. So I noticed that the interior is slathered in hectares of hard gray plastic. Even a swath or two of cloth somewhere, anywhere on the interior, would have gone a long, long way toward making this feel less like a large Hasbro toy inside and more like a solid competitor in the class. The powertrain, a 173-hp four-cylinder pulling around between 2,861 and 2,934 pounds depending on options -- feels uninspiring, especially mated to the six-speed automatic, the only tranny you can get. And while I’m sure there are fewer dbas and dbbs crashing around inside than there were last year, the interior nonetheless fairly rattled with road, wind and engine noise.

However, I will say that the rear styling does look like a BMW i8, so much so BMW should pay Hyundai royalties. Or vice versa. You’re getting i8 styling for a hundred grand less. So you got that going for you.

The new touchscreen with navigation is great. I would much rather have this than anything in a BMW, Mercedes-Benz or Audi. Try getting anywhere in a BMW, Mercedes or Audi that’s not already programmed into the navigation and you will long for a baseball bat.

And when I switched off Active Eco, a/c and stability and applied the patented Vaughn brake-torqueing technique taught in the finer drag racing schools across America I got a 0-60 time of 7.8 seconds. That’s not too bad, really. Except that the whole car sounded like it was going to dynamite at any minute.

The Elantra is Hyundai’s biggest seller in America, almost hitting a quarter-million last year. That includes the Elantra, Elantra Coupe and the Elantra GT. So people like Elantras. If you were looking for a Coupe competitor, you’d really only have the Honda Civic. I think I like the Civic more. Americans bought almost 100,000 more Civics last year than they did Elantras, so America agrees with me. Who can say why? The Civic coupe Si starts at about the same price as our test car and offers 32 more horsepower. Maybe that’s why. Or it could be “The Fast and Furious” effect, a well-documented phenomenon.

ASSOCIATE WEST COAST EDITOR BLAKE Z. RONG: I put 300 miles on this 2014 Hyundai Elantra Coupe on a trip to San Diego. It got us there, and later it got us back.

With the swoopiness of the Elantra sedan, it makes you wonder why people would spring for the coupe. Maybe they like pushing big barn doors open into oncoming traffic. Maybe they like bumping the seat up against the shins of their rear-seat passengers. Maybe they’re too selfish to have passengers.

But the coupe does look pretty handsome. The rear three-quarter view is the best angle for this car, where the shape might actually suggest a hint of sportiness. Otherwise, the teensy-tiny wheels look overwhelmed by so much swoopy, diving bodywork. They are 17 inches, which for anyone who came of age in the mid-’90s must give one pause. What does it take to have good proportions these days? The designers upsize wheels like they’ll never run out of diameters to spare, battling runaway proportions like a rising tide. Keep the wheels small, like the case of this Elantra and the woeful Ford Fiesta sedan, and every car suddenly appears like it’s on roller skates.

In the Elantra, the ride was well composed all the way down to San Diego. The steering, lifeless and vague, had an artificial heft that finally made sense after all those highway miles: it tracks straight and it’s impervious to pavement bumps. The engine felt bogged down through the midrange, and coarse at higher rpm. 173 hp should feel a lot sprightlier -- but to its credit, the Elantra Coupe did alright catching up. Not too much lag in the transmission: as far as I could tell, pressing “Active Eco” made the throttle heavier, but it mostly turned on a little light. I got 27 mpg on Interstate 5 with the button off, which seemed like a letdown. Did Active Eco make that big of a difference?

I spent that San Diego drive even more let down by the interior. Imagine a car interior entirely made from the rubber liner at the bottom of a cupholder -- that’s what the armrests on the doors and center console feel like. The seats are offensive in their faux-leather cheapness, as if upholstered via America’s finest emergency waiting rooms and airport terminals. The plastics are three shades of gray, if not 50, which at least lightens up the interior. That big rotary volume knob really should be better suited for navigation duties. Forcing the people to press ACCEPT if they so much as need to change a radio station is so 2004.

Ultimately, the Elantra Coupe’s only real competition is the Honda Civic coupe, the 800-pound gorilla of the I Really Really Really Don't Want A Sedan segment. The Civic is all angles, the Elantra swoopiness. The domineering Civic looks better inside and out, but the Elantra is an interesting stylistic choice. In a category dominated by so few, it seems to come down to which car resembles a computer mouse more.

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