My experience with the car has been great uptill now. I bought this car(2000 model) about 2 years now. Although it had about 70, 000 on the speedometer, it was still quite smooth and did’tn have many issues with it.
The car was droven from Mumbai to Bangalore the same day it was bought and to my surprise did not even heat up for a sec or had any issues during the 17 hrs straight journey. The car can go to surprising high speeds on a clean strech of road. I have managed to go uptill 170 kms on Bombay - Bangalore state high way and it still goes rock steady without any issues.
Car is quite tough and robest in it’s categories. Car has enough space for 5 to sit comfortablyy and smooth to drive. The power band on the Hyundai is on an higher RPM, so would not accelerate much on lower gears unless pushed. Car has to be pushed on to a certain RPM to behave like a sports car or usually just goes on behaving like a nice kid.
In terms of maintaince, although it is sort of expensive than an Maruti Esteem, it is still cheaper than cars like Honda or Ford. The car is quite robest and faults come on quite rarely once it has everything fixed by Hyundai service station.
The car’s only flaw is a low ground clearance, although it would not make any difference if the car is driven in Mumbai or Delhi. But on roads like Bangalore, you would have to be carefull especially when it is fully loaded on the backseat.
I would definatly recommend this car to someone who already had a car and would like to upgrade it for something bigger and comfortable. The person who does go for this car also should expect the kind of maintaince expected from any Big car and cannot be compared with Maruti 800 or Esteem in maintaince cost or purchase price.