2020 Hyundai Sonata review by The Straight Pipes. The Hyundai Sonata Hybrid is pumping out 192hp and 138 lb-ft tq from a 2L 4 cylinder engine. Sitting at $40,099 CAD, would this be your pick over the Toyota Prius, Honda Clarity, Toyota Camry Hybrid?
I’m yuri i’m jakob and we soul are going for a drive 2020 hyundai sonata hybrid with the solar roof panel horsepower torque 150 horsepower 139 pound-feet of torque however combined with the electric motor makes 192 horsepower from a two-liter four-cylinder hybrid engine so this is not a plug-in hybrid no it’s a traditional hybrid however they put a solar panel
On the entire roof and that helps give you more range so you can kind of plug into the sun yes but not that much more range and i’ll get into that in a second but it’s really cool that we have a solar panel on the friggin roof and if this is the first video of ours that you’ve watched consider subscribing we do two car reviews every week pretty much for the rest
Of our lives thank you so the roof can actually power all of the auxiliaries in the car so the radio the lights like all the supplementary stuff and it’s even lighter than a panoramic sunroof even though it’s got solar panels and you can see all the solar panels in the roof it looks really cool like the whole thing is covered in them and the solar panel can also
Power the electric motor and then also help with your actual 12-volt battery to prevent discharging so if you were to leave this out with like your lights on or something like that it will actually stop that okay so if i park it in the sun all day while i’m at work how many more kilometers can again okay so if you park this for six hours a day i have to be
Specific you get approximately three and a half kilometers per day so then what about twelve hours you’ve actually have to discharge it fully again to recharge it because it’s got a really small battery so you can’t just expect a full charge for 12 hours you need to use that six hours and then charge for another six hours so say you drove to work three and a
Half kilometres and let it sit there for six hours yes then you can drive home for your three and a half kilometers we should have a full charge and then if you’re home early enough you get enough charge for the next day maybe theoretically and you’d have to have full sun every day for the whole year to get about 1,300 kilometers of free driving for the whole
Year that’s like really cool technology it really is like the fisker karma had it and i believe the toyota prius also have it but i don’t think they had it in north america and it’s cool that all that solar panel stuff is on a cool car like this that we actually like yeah i really like this i personally think this is the best car to get for someone who doesn’t
Care about driving but has to i would just like the state that this is the best commuter car that you can buy and i am shocked by how much i like this okay let’s get into the reasons why and i’d like to start with the highway driving assist go for it this has the same stuff that the palisade the telluride the g9 you had the same with the last sonata we drove
That was not a hybrid it keeps you in your lanes very well very good lane keep and you don’t really have to put your hands on the wheel too much but it doesn’t let you take your hands off the wheel as much as the g90 used to i feel like they cut that down a bit however it’s definitely still the longest in the industry and we drove down the dvp in if you’re not
Familiar with the dvp it’s quite a curvy highway and i basically barely had to touch the steering wheel at all yes and if we drove on the dvp in a normal time during nine-to-five it would be bumper-to-bumper traffic which this would also do a great job and you wouldn’t have to do anything yeah so you have adaptive cruise so you don’t have to touch the pedals you
Don’t have to touch the steering wheel only about once every minute so you literally just sit there and get teleported places and then if you set it to the speed limit it’ll put it to auto and adjust you to whatever speed limit it sees and then it also has a mode to slow you down for curves you pretty much don’t have to drive this card like you just end up places
And it’s so relaxing like i’ve been so relaxed every time i drive everywhere yeah the next coolest thing is something that we really don’t talk about which is gas mileage yes because stupid good gas mileage it’s such a good hybrid yeah so it’s supposed to get five liters per hundred kilometers which is about 47 miles per american and so this thing is stupid good
On gas like you pretty much don’t have to fuel it up ever well i mean you do but it drops really really slowly yeah so you basically start with like around a thousand kilometers which is a lot of driving and if you need it for a commuter car because you don’t care about driving and you need to get to working back it must be amazing to i have to worry about like
Filling it up barely ever yeah and we’ve even seen numbers better than the quoted ones on the highway so it’s been doing an amazing job at just sipping fuel the next thing that makes this a great daily driver of people who don’t care about driving is the 360 camera and the parking camera there are so many great angles such great stitching you can see absolutely
Everything that parking isn’t even an issue you don’t have to be good or anything yeah it’s really high-res the stitching is good i’ve got no issues with this camera system it works flawlessly and it’ll zoom in on your back tire or your front tire so you know how close you get to a kerb so you won’t have to scratch your cool electrically looking wheels and
Since we’re talking about cameras there are cameras in the mirrors to help you with blind spot monitoring however those cameras project in your cluster in the left and right bubbles but i feel like it’s a bit laggy like the frame rates off a little bit so i did a comparison of the right bubble and the reverse camera looking at the back wheel and it is a bit
Laggy and while it is a cool feature i haven’t actually really used it i’ve been using my mirrors just like every other car so i think once you own this car you kind of look at them but i don’t really trust looking only at a camera to make lane changes yes and i think this system is much better than honda system that’s only on the passenger side which flashes
Up over your whole infotainment yeah and the funniest part about the gauge cluster in the camera system there is no rpm gauge because this is a hybrid yes it does have rpms but they didn’t prioritize that so the only way to see your rpms is to have your right turn signal on yeah and then it shows it in like 1.0 times 1000 rpm it’s so weird really weird and they
Give you paddles with it too but you can’t even ship because you don’t know where redline is well you can shift but you don’t guess it yeah yeah totally guessing and another cool daily driving thing is it does have apple carplay and android auto integration but the thing that sucks is that apple carplay isn’t full widescreen even though you’ve got a cool big
Wide screen now in these newer sonatas welcome to android life bro yeah just like that new mercedes i feel like apple carplay is kind of moving backwards but there are some new updates so we’ll test them out and probably september or something yeah hopefully android keeps up as well because i haven’t seen any new updates lately oh we’re getting new wallpapers
It’s yeah yeah you’ve got widgets now welcome to android again did you see that you can now send your key to certain cars to other people over imessage that seems like a bad idea if i have a new m5 i can on vacation i can text my key to a friend and they can use that phone to drive it that seems like a bad thing cuz you can use face recognition to send your key
Yeah and then if you just took a piece of paper and photo printed something on just that seems like a bad thing and one of the things that sucks the most about this car is that there’s no proximity touch on the door handles you have to click the button every single time to unlock it or lock it and to unlock all the doors you got to click the button twice maybe
There’s a way to program that i’m not sure but at least there’s the button and the last thing about this being a nice car if you don’t care about cars before you drive is that it actually looks pretty cool yeah it does look really good we really like the regular sonata the non-hybrid and this looks just as good yes we’ve got cool body lines again we’ve got those
Cool wraparound taillights we’ve got the different front bumper that has the chrome along the bottom and this one also has active arrow flaps in the front bumper which is totally different than the regular sonata and my favorite part of the looks is that this is in white and this white pops super hard in rainy conditions like the body lines are insane the fact
That you have so many different shades of white to black to gray is so crazy they did a great job with the body lines on this and this car being white is the worst car for me because you don’t see the headlights as much but you still kind of can’t especially like when it gets darker but it’s not the priority what’s like saying like a flashlight and working until
It’s dark yeah you do lose a bit of that chrome stripe that swoops around exactly but you get more body lines and rains so maybe it’s a good trade-off okay your turn to drive solar panel launch there’s not much like right off the line and then it makes a lot of loud sounds and then it’s just kind of okay it’s definitely not the worst no it’s not the worst but
Once you’re already rolling like i’m gonna floor it right now pretty slow to downshift and pretty slow to go but then it’s fine but a lot of time you’re full electric drive so you get that little like electric push and you feel extra cool cuz there’s no motor going yeah and this is a type of car that i would just drive in eco mode because it’s this type of car
Like i have never put this into sport mode well i did once for testing purposes and flipped it right back so let’s finish off the looks okay so the other hybrid unique thing that you get on this is the rear spoiler it’s black and obviously just like every other hybrid we have hybrid looking wheels and these ones are pretty good yeah they’re not like super cool
Super big but they definitely suit the car it looks like prius ish proportions yeah yeah but imagine this with like those ty con turbo s wheels do the sickest no chance alright and what is the continental recommended tire for the sonata hybrid the continental extreme contact dws o6 so now that we’re done with the looks are gonna put it into sport mode for one
Last time downshift with my paddles have no idea what our panel matt and i mean it’s it’s okay through cliche it’s definitely understeery it’s it is what it is and it’s just very comfortable that’s all i have to say about this car it is the opposite kind of car that should be designed for cliche corner yes it is opposite ty contour beau s but do you really have
Any issues driving it like daily driving it when you zone out behind the wheel and like right on the highway no and that’s the thing this is so comfortable to drive the steering is super light but it’s not like overly light it’s like the exact amount that i want in a car like this whereas i think i found the camry to light this is just right and then how about
Ride quality suspension everything feels okay yeah it feels great especially on the highway like going over potholes bumps whatever if you’ve got potholes on the highway you got big problems but in this not so much like it’s still really comfortable and one of the other best parts of this car is that it’s not a cvt it’s just a 6-speed auto so if i floor it there’s
No weirdness like i do have to wait for it to downshift but it still feels like a regular auto and i love that yeah it’s not something you can get mad at for waiting for this to kick into gear cuz it’s that kind of car exactly and while you’re driving this does recharge a bit like when you go on the breaks or coast do the brake pedal feel a bit weird to you i
Guess a little bit more grabby than i would but just a little bit weird to me when parking but definitely not a deal-breaker by any means no it’s not like ultra weird and there’s no way to change that i don’t think it varies by the drive modes your driving modes really affect your transmission and your gas pedal but i guess yeah it is your gas pedal cuz gas and
Battery pedal but you know what this also has is a coast mode so it’ll give you a warning when it thinks it’s time for you to let your foot off the throttle and coast oh that’s cool cuz you know how electric cars we had the discussion like very long time ago in the otic it’s like do you stay on the throttle or do you let off and coast in like a different gear
Yeah and porsche i believe sorry to keep bringing it up prioritizes coasting cuz i think they figured out that that’s more efficient than region depends if you’re going like long distances or like only city yeah and this also isn’t a full electric car so it doesn’t have that big of a battery so so now let’s talk about these drive modes we’ve got four of them eco
Is the one you want but we do have custom sport eco and smart however same problem as we had in the regular sonata the gauge transitions are terrible yeah it’s the same thing we’re not every single part of the animation is animating at every frame but some of it is so it gives it that laggy look but do you like the graphics of the gauges i really do energy flow is
Definitely my favorite gauge and i love seeing it in the infotainment as well because you can see exactly what the solar panel is doing what the brakes are doing what the battery’s doing it’s cool and the coolest part about the solar panel is there’s four modes completely off one bar two bars or three bars and when you go under a bridge or something you can see
That the solar panel is not getting any energy and then goes back to full energy it’s a lot of fun and then the most annoying thing which i thought was cool at first but now that i’ve driven this for longer it keeps telling me the weather conditions in my gauge cluster so right now it’s mostly cloudy yeah just cover that with a permanent marker it’s just it’s
Always there and i haven’t find a way to turn it off i get it for the solar panel but it’s always there like i can see what’s around me and then changing the modes just changes the colors really like you still can’t get an attack in any mode but what they’ve changed with this hybrid version is when you click the little menu button on the steering wheel instead
Of going through all your drivers settings and everything like you could on pretty much every other hyundai kia genesis now you kind of just get to change what’s in the right bubble or if you have your navigation or your driver assistance in the middle but there are still some things that you can change with a different button so if you hit ok it’ll actually
Bring up your driver assistance if you select that in your info which then you can customize it there but there’s a couple things about this infotainment that i really don’t like can you guess what it is well i know a couple things number one no tuning nub you have to actually physically press this touch button thing yeah they got rid of all the hard buttons
And they put in the lcd buttons i feel like having hard buttons on the bottom would be nice and in lower terms of sonatas you can get all hard buttons but there is no lower trim for the hybrid version and they added a way they even scroll through your stations but it’s an extra like three clicks yeah it’s pretty bad say i’m in my apple carplay how do i get to
The home screen and just press this button and then you have to press this button yes i’m used to that for like android it’s always two buttons they got rid of the hard button so you could go back but lucky we still have a star so i can program my apple carplay to go right to it yeah so like we said in our original sonata review bring back hard buttons yes cuz
These buttons suck and they’re even too far like you’re tall try to reach that i mean i can reach you barely by while driving i’m gonna crash but lucky for us we have wireless charging but no wireless carfully so it kind of cancels itself out yeah and no heartless android auto yet but apparently it’s coming in other cars yeah how about the rest of the interior
Pretty much the same as the regular sonata nothing too different still really comfortable the seats are comfortable but you have an issue with them yeah i just can’t get super comfortable in them they’re just not the right fit for me i would much prefer the seats from the autumn of those space seats yeah and i have no issues with these seats and the layout of this
Interior is actually really good we do have our shifter which is buttons however it’s all covered in gloss black everywhere and it’s filthy there’s only one thing i really don’t like about the interior in this model is that you can’t option a sunroof which i totally understand but i like my sunroof yeah well this is a lot better okay so now we should do a couple
More tests the cup holder test it fits a monster but these are two different sized cup holders a small boat fitting this back one but it’ll fit in this front one and you can also have your phone in the middle that’s exciting except it rattles non-stop oh yeah it’s not fat you need a little bit of like rubber padding or something and let’s check the visors this
Will settle whether the car is great or not interior three two one that’s live like butter alright so overall it’s great in here yes it is so with all that stuff out of the way we should probably get to the price well there’s only one price and one trim in canada forty thousand ninety nine dollars canadian yeah really good price the fact that this has a solar
Panel roof and everything in here is so convenient for not caring about driving cars i think this is pretty much like a no-brainer for people who need a new car yeah and it’s only a couple thousand dollars more than the top trim of the regular sonata and the regular sonata isn’t that exciting to drive i think the wheels are cooler i think it does look a little
Bit better but i personally would just go for this oh yeah if you’re going for a sonata go for the most hybrid ii one with the solar roof and like having this gimmick is cooler than most gimmicks right now until they come up with the inline but i really really like this car like this is one of my favorite cars this i’m shocked by how much i like this i know i
Keep saying that but like this is such a good car this is pretty much our next go-to recommendation for people looking for new cars who have to drive through a commute to work and don’t care about cars this is really cool and this will be my recommendation going forward so let us know what you think of the new sonata hybrid is a solar roof panel the coolest thing
Ever is there anything that’s better than this and guess to the next video right here let us know what you think it is your guess is as good as ours right now could be tuesday could be friday we don’t know
Transcribed from video
SOLAR Power Car – 2020 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid By TheStraightPipes
