Six months on from its global debut at the Frankfurt motor show, the Hyundai is making waves in Europe and India’s A segment hatchback markets.
The Hyundai i10 has always intrigued me. You couldn’t buy the old shape model in Korea and it’s the same situation for the new one. And yet the Kia that it’s closely based upon is not only available in the companies’ home market, it was the country’s second best seller in 2013: over 93,000 were sold. The puzzle can be solved by announcing one fact: the little Hyundai isn’t built in South Korea, while the Kia Morning (Picanto in Europe) is.
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So where does our i10 come from? Hyundai Assan’s Izmit plant in Turkey is the answer, but there is also build in India. Production commenced in both countries soon after the little car had its world premiere at the IAA in September 2013. The Izmit plant already built the larger i20 and European countries are the main export destinations for that car and its newer, smaller brother. Hyundai Assan stated in May 2013 that it plans on delivering 180,000 units of the new i10 to customers outside Turkey by 2015.
Izmit’s production capacity was doubled ahead of the addition of the new car: it can now produce 200,000 vehicles a year. New sections were added to the press and body shops to accommodate production of the additional model, and the body shop is now fully automated with robots. The capacity of the trim shop’s production line was also doubled, and a new test line put in.
Fully 95% of all cars Hyundai sells in Europe are designed and developed at the company’s European Technical Centre in Rüsselsheim, and 90% are built in the region at the company’s two production plants – in the Czech Republic (Tucson, ix20 & i30) and Turkey (i10 & i20).
HMIL sells the car we call the i10 as the Grand i10, as it’s pitched upmarket of the old model, which continues in production for the local market. It’s manufactured inside the giant Chennai 1 plant, as are the first generation model, plus the larger Eon and Verna. Another car, the Xcent, has just gone into production there. This is a sedan version of the Grand i10 and is mainly for local consumption. Chennai 2, meanwhile, is the main global build location for the i20. HMIL currently exports to around 120 countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific, as well as to Europe. The company has been India’s number one exporter for the past eight years consecutively.
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By GlobalDataYou get a lot for your money with this little Hyundai, starting with a five-door hatchback bodystyle. In fact, there’s no three-door i10. This second generation car comes with the choice of 1.0- and 1.2-litre petrol engines – a diesel is available only in India – and you can specify an automatic gearbox. Rivals are plenty and include the VW up!, Skoda Citigo, SEAT Mii, Peugeot 107, Citroen C1, Toyota Aygo and Fiat Panda, not forgetting the Picanto. One observation: surely one of the main reasons for the Panda’s ongoing segment leading success is its availability with a diesel engine?
The moment you open the driver’s door, you’ll see that the new i10 feels more upmarket than the old model. Build quality is a strongpoint, as is interior space, especially rear headroom. Up front, there are perfectly sized places for smartphones, drinks bottles, sunglasses and all the other gear that the target young female buyer will be looking for, and the dashboard is far more stylish than that in the old car. Not that there is much in the way of soft-touch plastics but such surfaces are rare in this segment where price is one of the main considerations.
Hyundai claims this car sits on a new architecture but you only have to look at the the shapes of the doors and their handles, as well as the car’s general silhouette, wheelbase dimension and bits of the interior to notice that it has to be based on the now three-year old Picanto.
Performance from the standard 1.0-litre three-cylinder engine is good but nothing special, with 0-100km/h taking 14.9 seconds. The 1.2-litre four-cylinder cuts over two seconds from that acceleration number but can also make for noisier progress when stretched. It will still be more desirable to many buyers as the CO2 average is just 114g/km compared to 108g/km for the smaller engine. A version of the 1.0-litre with stop-start is available and this option drops CO2 below the 100g/km mark.
Around town, the i10 works very well thanks to a ride which surprised me for how pliant it was. The steering is light yet accurate. and the handling and roadholding are on par with the class best up!, Mii, Citigo and Panda.
Hyundai UK’s MD Tony Whitehorn recently stated in an interview that he wants to see the brand’s sales reaching 100,000 by 2020. Last year, the total was 77,000, a more than doubling of registrations since 2008. How will Hyundai meet its target? Obviously, a continuation of the market’s expansion is needed but the importer has 22 new or revised models headed our way by 2017. The new i10 had built up an order bank of 8,000 cars by the time it went on sale in Britain in late January.
Getting the i10 onto the consideration list of potential buyers will be rival for Hyundai Motor Europe if it wants to achieve its target of 6.3 percent of the city car segment. The outgoing model achieved an average of 5.2 percent over its six-year lifecycle. HME sees the i10’s segment expanding by 25 percent between 2014 and 2016.
As a brand, HME hopes to lift its market share to four percent by 2017, and the i10 will play a lead role in that. Hyundai has sold six million cars to European customers since the company began sales in the region in 1977. It took what is now HME 19 years to sell its first million cars but since then, it has taken less time to reach each subsequent milestone, with the latest one million cars sold in just over two years.
As tested, the i10 1.0 Premium five-speed manual is priced at GBP9,995. Its 998cc three-cylinder engine produces 49kW (65bhp), top speed is said to be 96mph, the VED band is B, and the CO2 number is 108g/km. Combined fuel consumption is 60.1mpg.
