2017 Honda Civic vs Hyundai Elantra

What's the difference?

It’s taken a while to get here, and its wild looks may put some people off, but make no mistake, the Type R fits in perfectly with the current crop of high-performance hot hatches you can buy now, and those that are coming our way.

It’s not perfect, but what is most striking after our first try is just how well Honda has balanced performance against real-world requirements. It’s a real Type R, all right.

The Hyundai Elantra is an excellent value proposition and, in the case of this Turbo SR version, surprisingly fun to drive as well. Should be on your shopping list if you're after a mid-size sedan, and the five-year warranty is also a tempting offer.

‘Interesting’ is the word to describe the absolutely overt nature of the Civic Type R exterior. It looks like Speed Racer’s Mach 5 that’s been attacked by a group of 10-year-old car fiends with access to fibreglass moulds, such is the intensity of the bumps, lumps, swoops and curves that festoon this wild machine.

It’s 78mm wider than a stock Civic and 38mm wider, too, which comes across when the Type R hits the road.

While the front end is reasonably low key, things get loose and wild around the sides and back, with a World Time Attack-esque rear wing, exaggerated side skirts and overfenders and not two, but three exhaust outlets. The centre pipe, by the way, is there to increase noise levels.

This reviewer reckons it looks pretty awesome, offering a genuine road presence that puts even the overt Focus RS in the shade. Others, though, aren’t as sold, suggesting the car’s mature performance is spoiled by the street-racer vibe.

Inside is a similar story, with a red-themed trim spreading across the dash and steering wheel, and onto the deeply sculpted sports seats –custom-made Honda units that save 5kg each over the Recaros in the previous Type R – and even around the air vents.

This sporty little Elantra comes so close to being truly attractive that it hurts. A bit like being Mimi McPherson, or Doug Pitt (yes, Brad's brother, who still can't get over the fact he doesn't get to have Christmas with Angelina any more).

From side on it is almost sleek, spoiled only ever so slightly by what looks like a melted C-pillar. From the rear, and three-quarter it truly is sharp and almost Audi-like, and from front-on it looks like an i30 with a wider jaw, which is neither unpleasant, nor exciting.

Overall, it's not a bad looking car, and the more time you spend with it the more it grows on you.

The interior of our test vehicle was filled with excitement, or at least bright red "leather-appointed" seats, which caused my children to exclaim loudly with words like "cool".

What does let the Hyundai down is the quality and feel of the plastics, the door handles and basically everything you touch. It doesn't feel awful, but it just doesn't have that quality you get from other brands and, while the company's work in this area has gotten better in recent years, it all still feels just a bit thin.

The driver’s seat is the focus of the Civic, and from there it’s fantastic. The chunky steering wheel is dimpled to cup fingers and thumb, the narrow-gated shifter falls easily to hand and the deep buckets are both supportive and comfortable… although they could be mounted even lower in the car.

The rear offers a surprising amount of head room, given the shape of the car, but it needs the cooperation of the front-seat passengers to give back seaters enough knee and foot room. There are ISOFIX points for two seats, as well.

Two cup holders are part of an oddly shaped lidless bin between the front seats, and bottles will fit in all four doors. Rear seaters miss out on cupholders and USB points, although there is one in the centre bin that can be used if needed.

At 414 litres, the boot area is the same as the civilian Civic's, and 764 litres with the seats down, even despite the extra exhaust and suspension gubbins under the floor. The reason? No room for even a space-saver spare, and a can of sealant is your only get-out-of-jail card.

The biggest letdown in a practicality sense is the multimedia system – it’s well off the pace when compared to other products in the segment. It’s not intuitive, the buttons are too small, there are far too many menus and its performance during our test was suboptimal at best.

The inherent advantage of a sedan, even a smallish one, over a hatch is the sense of interior space, and the roof line, shoulder room and rear leg room really do stand out in the Elantra.

The 458 litres of boot space is the other obvious big win here.

Rear passengers get ISOFIX child seat mounts in the outward positions, a bottle holder in each door, while the front doors feature the same, plus two more cupholders between the front seats and in the fold-down rear armrest. Oddment/phone storage is plentiful and practical just under the dash, where you'll also find the USB port positioned.

Generally speaking, the Elantra offers a very practical, pleasant cabin, but in the SR Turbo it also manages to feel a bit special.

At this price point you'd be expecting to have a lot of options to tick, easily taking you up beyond $30,000, but the amount of fruit you get included is actually very impressive. It includes: all the safety equipment you could want, active and passive, a reversing camera, front and rear parking assist, dusk-sensing headlamps, Proximity Sensing Smart Key with push-button start, an old-school handbrake, which I love, a 7-inch colour touch screen with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, heated and power adjustable front seats, cruise control, rain-sensing wipers, Smart Bootlid with hands-free opening, sports body kit and rear muffler with twin exhaust tips, leather-ish sports bucket seats and 17-inch alloys.

It is, in short, excellent value for money.

Honda’s K20C1 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbocharged engine was revealed to the world in 2013, before hitting the road in 2015 under the bonnet of the fourth-generation Civic Type R (we didn’t get that one in Australia).

The company is best known for its nat-atmo shriekers, but it’s hard to argue with a 400Nm torque curve that kicks in between 2500 and 4500rpm.

Its 228kW output is actually slightly down on overseas numbers, thanks to a retune for 95 RON fuel. Honda says its 5.7-second 0-100km/h time is the same, despite the power drop.

Only one gearbox is offered – an uprated version of the regular Civic’s six-speed manual, with marginally taller third, fourth and fifth gears, a lightened flywheel on one end and a helical LSD at the other. Clutch feel is excellent, and the shift action is tight and crisp.

While the base Elantra makes do with a bigger, less powerful 2.0-litre engine providing 112kW and 192Nm, the more tech-savvy turbo 1.6 in the SR manages 150kW and a far more impressive 265Nm, which is yours for the enjoying from 1500 to 4500rpm.

The six-speed manual is a great companion for getting the most out of this engine, with quick and easy shifts that make you feel involved in the experience.

You can expect a 0 to 100km/h time just slightly north of a brisk seven seconds, or a couple of tenths under if you go for the DCT auto. It's no sports car, but it's no slug either.

Honda rates the Civic Type R’s combined fuel economy rating at 8.8 litres per 100km. After a 240km dash across Tasmania, we recorded a dash-indicated figure of a surprisingly low 9.6 L/100km.

It has a 47-litre fuel tank, it’s been tuned to accept 95 octane fuel. Oh, and it won’t gain back that missing power by using 98 octane, sadly.

There is a small penalty to pay for the enjoyment of driving the manual, because its fuel-economy figure of 6.1 litres per 100km is just slightly higher than the self-shifter, which offers 5.8 litres per 100km. Both figures are highly respectable.

At a shade under 1400kg (about 70kg heavier than a regular Civic RS), the fifth-gen Type R is about 350kg heavier than the 1997 Civic Type R… but it’s a handy 100kW more powerful at 228kW, not to mention 250Nm to the good at 400Nm.

It’s not a porker by hot-hatch standards, though, and that torque piles in hot and strong right around 3000rpm. It makes for a very different driving experience than previous Type Rs, which relied on screamingly high revs to make power.

The Civic’s platform was always designed around the eventual arrival of a Type R, and a multilink rear end makes a welcome return to the Type R. Combined with a long wheelbase for a hatch, as well as specially designed front suspension that limits torque steer and tramlining, the Civic Type R is a faithful and willing companion, rather than an outright lunatic.

The sheer amount of physical grip from huge 245mm wide tyres makes for eye-opening corner-entry speeds, and the rear end simply hunkers down and plays along.

The car has three drive modes – Comfort, Sport and R+ - which adjust all sorts of parameters including throttle sensitivity, steering weight and the stiffness of the dampers.

To be honest, we didn’t notice a great deal of difference between the top two modes, but the Comfort setting gave the Type R a genuinely civil edge, spoiled only by excessive tyre and wind roar at even moderate speeds.

A blast around Baskerville circuit in Tasmania revealed more of the Type R’s cooperative, neutral nature.

It would have been nice to see an Individual mode, giving the driver the option, for example, to wind the dampers down to Comfort for more grip in rougher conditions, but keep the powertrain in Sport.

A blast around Baskerville circuit in Tasmania revealed more of the Type R’s cooperative, neutral nature and the depths of that amazing front-end grip.

Big four-piston Brembo brakes on 350mm hatted front rotors stood up to the assault reasonably well, but if it was our car, we’d upgrade the pads and brake fluid to more hardy items if we were taking it to the track regularly.

The engine can be caught off boost under 3500rpm at times, so in that respect it’s still like the old Type Rs; give ’em revs and they’ll love you forever.

It could also stand to be a bit more overt with its exhaust noise. A bi-modal system, for example, that emits pops, crackles and bangs on throttle overrun would suit it perfectly.

In all, the Type R is an absolute barrel of monkeys to punt at speed, and it doesn’t punish you when you go to drive home again.

"Surprising" is the word that comes to mind here. I'd driven an Elantra SR earlier in the year in Perth, a place which, particularly in the heat of its burning summers, can make anything feel like a chore. I'd been not entirely whelmed by the experience, neither overwhelmed by its performance or too awfully underwhelmed by its dual-clutch auto.

Switching into the manual for a couple of weeks in Sydney I was far more impressed by the way it copes with the cut and thrust of traffic in a big city.

The Elantra feels torquey and urgent, and if you apply yourself to the driving experience and rev it hard in each gear there's genuine fun to be had.

My wife, who tends to review cars in sound bites, also declared it hugely enjoyable, and sounded even more surprised than me.

It's an easy car to drive sedately in, but if you're in the mood there's some character lurking beneath the bonnet as well.

She did find the ride a little firm, also, but I quite liked it, because it was never too harsh and simply added something to the sportiness of the SR.

With its wild seats and other look-at-me touches, the Elantra struck me as mutton dressed up as beefcake at first, but it actually does deliver on at least some of that visible promise.

The steering is also precise and quick without being overly light. It's an easy car to drive sedately in, but if you're in the mood there's some character lurking beneath the bonnet as well.

And at less than $30,000, the whole package is far more than you'd expect to get for the money.

Yes, a Mazda might be slightly more involving, or a Subaru more sporty and sharper but Hyundai is closer to its competitors than it's ever been, and still offers outstanding value.

The gear is all here with traction control, ABS, EBD, Brake Assist System, Hill-start Assist Control, Blind Spot Detection, Lane Change Assist, Rear Cross Traffic Alert, a reversing camera and parking assist front and rear. Driver and front passenger get four airbags between them and side curtain airbags are also standard. It also gets a five-star ANCAP rating, but AEB is absent from the spec list.

Honda offers the Type R with a five-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty, and suggests service intervals of 10,000km or 12 months.

Its fixed-price servicing regime locks in the cost of the first 10 services at $307 each, which is a real bargain given the car’s performance.

Hyundai offers an impressive five-year/unlimited kilometre warranty, which brings a lot of peace of mind, and service intervals are every 12 months or 10,000km. The first three services are capped at $259 each, while the fourth climbs to $299, before the $399 fifth service for a total of  $1475 over five years or five services.