I had the opportunity to test drive a Verna, Hyundai was kind enough to organise a car for the day. Lets looks at what I liked about the car.

  • The car has excellent suspensions, ideal for Indian road conditions. We drove through bad Mumbai roads and in the monsoons the roads can have some really big pot holes. Ideal situation to test any car’s suspensions and the Verna did well in our test drive. We hardly felt any of the bumps.

  • The Gear is smooth and easy to change. Reverse gear is not as easy to figure out for people moving up from a small car. Once you know this, its easy. So before you take you new darling for a spin, make sure you know how to switch to reverse.

  • The car also has a clutch lock and the car doesn’t start unless the clutch is pressed. This is a safety feature.

  • RPM meter on a dashboard is nice to have, although the dashboard could be a tad better considering all the fancy new dashboards. The Honda Civic has the best dashboards and had a set a new standard for other cars to follow, although Civic falls in a completely different category.

  • Lots of space inside and well designed interiors, It has space for small things, bottles, sun glasses, cellphones, coins and more. There is also a nice storage tray right under the steering wheel which is useful to keep things like maps.

  • Adjustable seats have two levels of adjustment which is nice but its not as easy to quickly switch to two different setting. This may be useful if two different people of different height drive the car and want to adjust the seat height.

  • The diesel car that we test drove had a good pickup. It was also very quite while inside the car and didn’t feel like some of the other diesel cars that I have driven before. In fact it doesn’t feel like a diesel car at all, thanks to the CRDi technology. This is a 1500CC engine.

  • The petrol engine is 1600 CC all aluminum, which make the engine lighter and hence better pickup and mileage.

  • The car is a pleasure to drive and unlike a small car, you also don’t realise when you touch 100kmh as you don’t realise you are driving fast inside the car.

  • The headlights are adjustable so you can point it on the road correctly and can be adjusted depending on if more people are in the car or if the car is loaded.

  • The AC is very powerful and effective too.

  • ABS option: I would personally highly recommend taking this option, cause safety shouldn’t be an option. Hyundai should seriously consider making this as a part of standard accessory.

What I didn’t like.

The gear ratio requires frequent changing between 2nd and 3rd gear in city driving. This is a problem I face with the Santro as well which I own and find this a pain especially if you are driving often in Mumbai traffic.

Final Verdict

Overall an excellent car and very good value for money, the diesel may be better for some who do lots of driving and want to save on running costs.

Hyundai Verna web site

Note: The site works best only with IE and I couldn’t get some of the pages to open in Firefox or Konqueror.

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