Car relaunches are quite frequently less exciting than car manufacturers would like us to believe. What gets trumpeted as an earnest return to the drawing board, leading to a fearlessly radical reappraisal of an old motoring favourite, often turns out, on closer inspection, to be the same old car with a slightly differently shaped gear fob and a minutely foreshortened indicator stalk.
In some cases, a fractionally improved braking system might be in place, but its effects will be discernible only to Michael Schumacher and those with the gift of extra-sensory perception.
Hyundai seems, at first sight, to be going for new records in this department with their relaunch of the Elantra, which arrives among us with an extra letter in its name from last time out. The Elantra used to be known as the Lantra, though only in Britain. In the rest of the world - or at least in those extensive parts of it in which the Korean company sells cars - it was known as the Elantra. Here, Lotus, who make a car called an Elan, objected to the use of the word Elantra on trademark grounds.
You can see Lotus's point: on the one hand, the Elantra, a cut-price saloon, aimed at people who would probably like a BMW but can only budget for half of one; on the other hand, the Elan, a sharply angled, deeply uneconomical, pigeon-frightening road-burner, aimed at hobbyists looking for pure pleasure from their third car. People were going to be getting them mixed up all the time.
Recently, however, Lotus must have decided to say "What the heck" because Hyundai is now free to release a British Elantra and unify the global brand under the one title.
Apart from the fact the car now takes longer to write, the new model does make some advances on the now discontinued Lantra, and not all of them of the order of "new soundproofing under the rear shelf" and "improved gear teeth design" in the manual transmission.
For instance, consider the new position of the passenger's airbag - not where it used to be, halfway up the dashboard, but stuffed under a panel on top. According to Hyundai, this "helps further to reduce the risk of injury on inflation". There we all were thinking that airbags were intended to spare you from injury, when actually it turns out they are lethal if they catch you from the wrong angle. Is nothing safe?
I was unable to find a passenger willing to let me put these claims for the airbag to the test, so we will have to take Hyundai's word for it. They should know. While building the Elantra, they involved it in no fewer than 150 collisions, which was either very thorough of them or very careless.
Another difference from the Lantra: the new car is wider, taller and longer. Altogether, its shape looks something like a throwback to the early 1980s, before cars - even saloons - took it upon themselves to turn all snubby on us. Hyundai seems to have thought: "If Duran Duran can come back, then why not cars that have the Ford Granada as their template?"
Whatever, the Elantra is now more capacious than many of the rivals in its class, including the Vauxhall Vectra and the Nissan Primera. Hyundai even fearlessly points out that the Elantra is bigger than the Volvo 540 - so is a Portakabin, but that doesn't mean that people who have it in mind to buy a Volvo are likely to change their ideas and purchase a demountable building instead.
Nor, probably, an Elantra. For all the safety testing and the minute attention to airbags, there seemed to me to be something thin and frail about it, and something very definitely at a remove from Volvo's big lumps of Swedish metal. The boot on the Elantra closes with a confidence-sapping "poink". The door handles are as light as cup cakes and the doors themselves seem to share certain important physical qualities with Coke cans. As for the ridges along the bonnet and down the side of the car, they add a fizz to the car's appearance, but they also look like something you might have put in it yourself, with access to a metal ruler and a steady hand.
Inside, it's the places where the car attempts to score points for luxury that the Elantra most reveals its nature. The top of the range 2.0 CDX that I drove contained large amounts of slippery leather and an acre or two of mock walnut, as if attempting to look like the library in a stately home. That's not such a bad idea in itself, but unfortunately the walnut was so triumphantly mock, it looked more plastic than the parts of the dashboard, which weren't pretending to be anything else.
To drive, the car was slick to the touch - all easy gear changes and light pedals - but it wasn't really the driving that stayed in the mind; it was the contrary nature of Hyundai's achievement, at this of all times. As manufacturers compete to produce ever bigger bargains in ever more surprising packages, Hyundai has pulled off a trick whose effects are almost reassuring: the production of a car that is not only cheap, but feels like it.
