The Hyundai Sonata is a modestly priced executive saloon and - as it jostles for our attention - a problem it's going to have to wrestle with straight away is that the words "modestly" and "executive saloon" sit a little uneasily in the same sentence.
After all, for the average executive on his mobile in the fast lane of the M6, the first requirement of a saloon car is that it should be not competitively priced, but competitively expensive and have a badge that functions as a big, fat, in-yer-face (or certainly in-yer-mirror) chromium price tag. Thus, as far as a dauntingly large portion of the core market is concerned, it defeats the point somewhat even to consider hitting the road in a masterpiece of Korean cost-cutting. Laugh? They'd almost get off the phone.
Still, these are recessionary times, which ought perhaps to bode well for counter-cyclical products such as a low-end fleet car - particularly a decent one like the Sonata which, in this latest overhaul, has acquired a new shape and some middle-class manners wholly in keeping with that touch of Classic FM in its name.
Sonatas were first sold in the UK in 1989 and have gone quietly and anonymously about their business ever since, helped in this by their fairly close resemblance in shape to a four-wheeled cereal packet. Now, though, in its fourth incarnation, the car has been resculptured - and by someone apparently working in clay, rather than someone working in old Shreddies boxes.
The tail end now has a pert arc to it and the bonnet flows grandly into a thick-ribbed grille between a natty pair of headlamp clusters that wouldn't look completely out of place on a Mercedes. True, what happens to the exterior profile in between the front and back is almost heroically unremarkable and could have happened to any saloon car from the past 25 years or so, if only you could remember. Even so, this is a distinctly more nobby Sonata than anyone has seen, a far cry from the upper-echelon mini cab that it formerly was.
Hyundai thanks the Sonata for almost single-handedly turning round its American operation. The car has recently been scoring points off the Toyota Camry, which would be among its key rivals in this country, too, along with the Vauxhall Omega. The Sonata recently stormed all over the Camry in one of the United States Auto Club's popular "brown-bag" tests.
By the pleasing rubric of this "blindfold" consumer test, drivers take turns to steer a pair of cars that have been cunningly wrapped in brown paper to make their brands indistinguishable. It's the kind of thing you probably need to see in person to appreciate fully but, as I understand it, the windows are left unwrapped, for the better avoidance of accidents. Anyway, two-thirds of the 528 drivers involved preferred the bagged Sonata to the bagged Camry.
What percentage of those drivers would have preferred the bagged Sonata once they had seen the unbagged one is not revealed. But I suspect it's likely to have been small. Certainly, the car attracted some keen interest when immobile on my drive. One late-night admirer - having paused, I assume, to note the finer details of the car's restyling and to marvel at how far 15 grand can be made to stretch these days - took a screwdriver to the driver's side window-lining, popped the glass into a million tiny nuggets on the driver's seat, and then whipped the stereo from the kidney-shaped faux walnut dashboard console.
The last time that happened to me, the car on my drive was, again, a Hyundai. Funny that - unless of course it's you who has to phone the people at Hyundai and tell them they're another hi-fi short. They were very nice about it - as nice as they could possibly be, in fact, though without going so far as to promise in future to build cars with fully integrated, persuasively unjackable stereos, as most companies tend to these days.
Items unstolen from my Sonata included the illuminated ashtray, the leather gearknob and the wing mirrors, which, if required, gently warm to an optimum temperature. You don't have to worry about choosing optional extras for this car, because none are available. Hyundai have simply tipped everything they've got into the Sonata as standard, principally to continue snubbing the Camry by out-equipping it.
The burglar also left the all-new "intelligent airbag", which sounds like a contradiction in terms but is, according to Hyundai, a particularly sparky form of airbag that only inflates when it's really necessary - no bad thing in an airbag, I guess, though I had always assumed that was what all airbags did anyway, even the stupid ones.
Fitted with an automatic transmission, coupled with a pretty redundant four-speed manual override, my 2.0-litre Sonata floated smoothly and quietly about the streets and felt reassuringly firm underfoot. At no point did I worry that a passing lorry or aggressive road-calming device would cause all the body panels to fall off, which is by no means a given with everything in the Hyundai range. When the company tightens its belt around your Beamer, you could do worse than a Sonata.
