Hyundai Elexio review: The Korean EV built for Chinese tastes

[SINGAPORE] The Hyundai Elexio has a secret under its floor: Its battery pack is full of BYD Blade cells, which have a reputation here for not turning the cars above them into fiery deathtraps. I never said it was an exciting secret.

Still, it makes the Elexio an unusual creature. Conceived by Beijing Hyundai, it’s a Korean electric vehicle built in China, very much for Chinese tastes.

Those tastes are obvious the moment you climb in. Across the dashboard runs a 27-inch touchscreen (made up of one seamless pane rather than two abutting screens), which looks expensive enough to have annoyed the killjoys in charge of cost control at Beijing Hyundai.

Physical buttons, apart from those on the steering wheel, number somewhere around zero – a departure from the button-and-knob user-friendliness of the other Hyundai EVs.

As much as I’ve come to detest touchscreens, the Elexio’s is at least whimsical. You can set the home screen as a 3D cityscape with buildings that represent apps. Want to engage Apple CarPlay? Fly into the tower with the relevant logo on top.

There are also arcade games to let you while away the time if you’re waiting for the car to finish charging. My favourite is a racing game that you can play using the steering wheel and pedals, which tickled me more than it should a grown man.

Adjusting the air-conditioning or seat ventilation on the move takes too many taps, but on the plus side, the Elexio has a slim display at the base of the windscreen, much like the new BMW iX3’s. It’s bright, clear and puts important info such as your speed in your eyeline.

In other places, the cabin smacks of effort. The materials are soft to the touch and feel posh (more grief for Mr Cost Controller and gang), and overall the interior feels plusher than, say, the inside of a Mercedes-Benz GLB.

Rear passengers get air-con vents in the pillars, there are enough cupholders to satisfy a serious Chagee junkie, and the backrests recline enough to put some airline seats to shame (admittedly, not hard to do).

A companion smartphone app, the kind that lets you pre-cool the cabin before stepping in, would have been nice to have, especially since plenty of Chinese EVs at this price have one, but the Elexio is otherwise a practical machine.

The boot holds 506 litres, or 1,540 l with the seats folded. There’s no frunk, which is surprising given that there isn’t exactly a nuclear reactor under the bonnet.

Instead, the Elexio has a 136-horsepower motor that hauls the car along pretty gamely but, ultimately, pretty languidly – zero to 100 kmh takes all of 10.7 seconds.

What I disliked most behind the wheel is that there’s a lag between pressing the accelerator and anything happening when you pull away, which makes you feel like your trousers are around your ankles when you’re trying to win a traffic-light Grand Prix.

Yet, the chassis is a delight. The Elexio corners with real poise, barely rolls, and the steering tells you what the front tyres are up to, which isn’t a given with Chinese EVs.

In fact, it feels slightly sharper than Hyundai’s own Ioniq 5, although really, the gentle acceleration means it’s just best to leave it in the Eco driving mode and enjoy the scenery.

You can do that for up to 405 km in the Standard Range version I tried. The Long Range version (which costs S$24,000 more) stretches that to 546 km, but carrying nearly 300 kg more, it needs 12.1 seconds to reach 100 kmh.

For S$191,999 with Certificate Of Entitlement (COE), the Standard Range is the one to have, if you ask me, especially if the majority of your motoring is confined to Singapore.

Come to think of it, as much as the Elexio was aimed at China (Hyundai doesn’t even sell it in South Korea), it might as well have been built to Singaporean tastes. It’s roomy, pleasingly plush inside and priced like a Chinese car, though it steers more sweetly than one.

It also has those BYD Blade battery cells, which can only be a selling point, given how much BYD has earned the trust of buyers here. For the Elexio, they may turn out to be not so much a secret as a secret weapon.