Used 2022 Hyundai Kona N Consumer Reviews
Used Kona for sale
A pleasant surprise
Gerard, 06/17/2022
2022 Hyundai Kona N 4dr SUV (2.0L 4cyl Turbo 8AM)
81 of 88 people found this review helpful
I've been test driving new cars lately, anticipating a purchase in the near future. This week I drove three different Subarus, as well as the newly redesigned Honda HRV and the Hyundai Kona, including the N-Line model and an AWD SEL. I have always been pleased with Subarus and Hondas and have owned two Hondas and two Subarus. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed driving the Kona. I realize that the cars I drove have significant differences in size and other features, but I have to say that I found the Kona to be solid, stable, quiet (compared to its competitors) and full of value for its price. Both of the models I drove were loaded with a variety of features, including standard safety systems, leather or sport cloth seating, and in the case of the N-Line, a very peppy turbo engine. It was very fun to drive and seemed to be solid and a surprisingly roomy subcompact car. While the Kona is not a luxury car it offers options often seen on much more expensive vehicles. I'm 6 feet tall and it seemed to have plenty of leg room up front, as well as comfortable seats. I did not find the ride to be "rough or bouncy" as some others have stated. I guess you just have to try it to see if it meets your expectations. It exceeded mine and for the price point I found the Kona to be an outstanding value with a great warranty, lots of tech (but not complex) and solid build quality. It did not feel cheap, though Hyundai could do a bit more to make the base Kona contain less hard plastics. The N-Line model and the Limited version have more soft touch materials inside. I strongly suggest that you take a look. It is highly rated by Consumer Reports magazine and the car received a Best Buy award from Kelly Blue Book.
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Never thought I would buy a Hyundai
Fazzster, 03/08/2023
2022 Hyundai Kona N 4dr SUV (2.0L 4cyl Turbo 8AM)
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Having owned many performance cars over the years I never thought I would own a Hyundai or even an automatic. But watching the N cars develop with the help of Biermann I was intrigued. Having wanted a hatch that can can be daily driven with gusto and provide utility to haul my Mt Bikes to the trail heads was key. WRX is ugly and a sedan. GTI has reliability concerns (personal experiences) and the tech inside is not user friendly. Civic Type R is my dream car but center exhaust voids the ability for a bike hitch and is too expensive. Kona N checked all the boxes and the added ride height that everyone complains about is welcome for traversing the dirt roads I sometimes travel on. The performance of this car is amazing from the brakes to the impossibly fast dual clutch transmission (that I never thought I would ever own). All this performance plus an average 27-29 mpg and often 30-32 when you take it easy on it. I have to say the paint quality exceeds any of my Honda's or Subaru's I have owned and the fit of body panels as well. The money was not spent on the interior but they did a great job with what they had to work with. Plastics are solid and the use of different textures and materials makes it appealing. It is too early to tell about reliability. This particular build was not affected by the transmission recall so that's a plus. Hopefully it serves me well. Suspension in the softest setting could be softer but its still livable. You forget about all that when you crank up the exhaust sound however. The one take away about this car is it has a personality all its own. It's been a while since I experienced this. Not since my beloved S2000 back in 2002.
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FUN FUN FUN
Pete, 01/17/2023
2022 Hyundai Kona N 4dr SUV (2.0L 4cyl Turbo 8AM)
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Perfect size to enjoy driving and an abundance of power and torque at low end to win stop light Gran Prix against almost anything. The eight speed dual clutch is so superior to that in my Mercedes CLA that Stuttgart should be ashamed. Smooth shifts, rev matching and with a no guess shift selector (hear that BMW). There are multiple adjustments for steering load, shift program, suspension, turbo boost, a exhaust sound. All real and mix and match with multiple ways to store alternatives beyond the six built in. Red button gets you 16 sec of overboost and when selected counts down 16 to zero. Interior is pretty austere but drivers power seat has power lumbar adjustment. Blue stitching and suede inserts add some color and texture. Info/entertainment system is pretty much intuitive and has touch or steering wheel access. Lane centering is OK with gentle ping-ponging and there is no adaptive cruise control. Back seat is limited on leg room and luggage space with seat up is limited even for a small SUV. Same with fuel tank. On a trip from the Gulf to NYC I averaged about 29 mpg with max range indicated after fill up as about 300 miles. The somewhat short range and stiff ride even in the softest setting are the only meaningful shortcomings for me but the fun factor goes way beyond compensating. I leased the car from an excellent dealer about 200 miles from my home. No markup and delivery to my door two days after my first internet contact. My three local dealers are typical Hyundai-Kia indifferent to customer expectations but at least the car comes with free scheduler maintenance for as long as I have itt.
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The Kona N is an overpriced clown car
Tom who likes sporty cars, 02/16/2022
2022 Hyundai Kona N 4dr SUV (2.0L 4cyl Turbo 8AM)
37 of 83 people found this review helpful
Based on all the reviews I read for the Kona N, and the many videos on the you-know-the-site site, I had high expectations for the Kona N. I was expecting something comparable to the VW Golf GTI in performance, but with a less cramped feeling on the inside. I watched the inventory closely and when one showed up at a local dealership in mid February (2022) I went over the next day and took it for a test drive. My expectations were such that I had already thought through the steps for purchase. It was the white one, and even though I've never much liked white cars, I liked the look of this car a lot. And for me the size was perfect: bigger than the standard hatchback, but not as big as a compact SUV like the Sportage. I knew that the user interface for setting up the custom setting was complicated, so I read up on this beforehand. I wanted to be certain that I had the suspension setting in the softest mode, which is the "normal" mode, because one of my concerns was that the suspension would be too taught. It would be an understatement to say that the Kona N fell short of my expectations. Still, there is a lot to like about it, including, to name just one thing, that large bright LCD display where you see the navigation map. But there were two notable things wrong with the car, that nothing else could possibly make up for. First, the suspension was ridiculously taut. In the past I've driven some cars that were known for having too-stiff suspensions. But the Kona N's suspension was like nothing I've ever experienced before, except possibly for the go-carts I used to race many years ago. The sensation of bouncing was ever-present, except when driving on a perfectly smooth road. With any slight bump or undulation in the road surface, the Kona N felt like it was bouncing. I would swear that if there had been a camera set up to give an image of the contact between the tire under me and the road, there would have been air between the tire and the road a good portion of the time, on a road that I had never previously noticed to have any bumps at all. It was actually very weird. And this was with the suspension set to "normal", the softest setting. I double checked to make certain that the selected driving mode was Custom1, and that the suspension setting for this mode was "normal". I would not enjoy a single trip to the grocery and back in this car, and the idea of having this car for everyday driving is completely out of the question. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. The other thing that I really, really did not like was that it was not the least bit quick. All of the write-ups say that the 0-60 time is in the low 5-second range, but it sure didn't feel like it to me. To me, it didn't feel like it was accelerating hard enough to do 0-60 in under 7 seconds. I don't know how to explain this, because given the claimed power and the claimed mass, it should have been able to do 0-60 in about 5 seconds. But it absolutely did not. I didn't time it, but I know what acceleration feels like in a car that does 0-60 in under 6 seconds, and this car did not feel anything like that. I did not play with the launch control, because I wasn't interested in that. But I had the engine setting set to sport+, and I had it in manual shift mode, and I watched the tachometer, and the rpm range I was using, from about 2500 rpm to about 5000 rpm, this car simply was not quick. In fact, I would call it slow. I was so surprised by this that I made several attempts to see how quickly it would accelerate, pulling away from stop lights and driving on one particular road where there is no traffic so that I could do a couple of runs to see how hard it would accelerate. The weird thing about it was that in spite of the acceleration being a total disappointment, and in spite of there being a limited slip differential, the front wheels spun and hopped a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit about maybe half a second, each time I tried to get it to accelerate hard. This is something that I would have expected if it had accelerated as hard as I expected it to accelerate. But given that the acceleration was decidedly poor, there shouldn't have been any front wheel spin at all. The limited slip different won't intervene when both tires are losing traction in straight-line acceleration, so this didn't have anything to do with the function of the LSD. What it had mainly to do with was the stiff suspension. Under acceleration the weight of the vehicle shifts to the rear. The front end literally becomes lighter, and because it is lighter, the spring pushes the front of the chassis higher. If the front suspension stiffness is properly matched to the vehicle, the suspension will insure (mostly) that the wheels will remain in contact with the road even as the front end gets light. But this isn't what happened, and I had to think for little bit about the physics and the suspension before it dawned on me what was happening. I realized that there is only one way to explain this. When the front wheels encounter a mild bump in the road, rather than the suspension absorb the bump, the wheels and the chassis get pitched up together, and as soon as the mild bump in the road is history, there is no longer sufficient contact force between the tire and the road surface. The road I was on was a very good road, very flat and level, with no bumps that I ordinarily notice, and with a good surface. The suspension on this car is so excessively stiff that front wheels routinely lose traction when trying to accelerate, on any road surface that isn't absolutely perfect. This is a major, major flaw of this car. The suspension is way, way too stiff. And please don't anyone tell me that this is how it should be because it is a "track car". It isn't a "track car", and even if you want to think of that way, the same problem is going to be an even bigger problem on a track than it was for me on a few very good stretches of ordinary road. And it wouldn't make sense to call it a track car, because it isn't anywhere near as quick as people are claiming that it is. The Kona N is a clown car. It isn't anywhere near as quick as it should be, and the suspension is so ridiculously stiff that it ruins any potential for performance by allowing the front wheels to spin at the drop of a hat on any road that isn't absolutely perfect. I don't understand how a manufacturer could release a car like this, although, we are talking about Hyundai. They decided to make an "N" version of the Kona, like they did with the Veloster. They rushed into it and they screwed it up. It is a good-looking subcompact SUV with a lot of things going for it but ruined by some problem with engine performance and by a suspension that is way, way, way stiffer than it should be. Maybe in another year or two they'll figure out what is wrong with the engine and will change the suspension. I won't hold my breath.
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Hyundai Downslide
Uncle Mike, 03/02/2023
2022 Hyundai Kona N 4dr SUV (2.0L 4cyl Turbo 8AM)
5 of 13 people found this review helpful
I owned a Hyundai Veloster non-turbo, and turbo (pre 2018 redesign). The 201 HP turbo is pretty lightweight and fairly quick, has fantastic leather seats, a much better designed interior, and enough interior padding to not be called cheap. The discontinued Veloster N and the soon to be Kona N (for the exact same reasons) are HUGE disappointments. The entire focus is on the engine, and at 275 HP, should in no way, shape, or form be priced higher than a 4 cyl 315 HP Mustang, v6 305 HP Challenger or 335 HP Camaro. Demanding $ 33 to 36,000 dollars for a car with horribly cheap plastic, non-leather seats, stiff ride, useless Summer tires, and not very good MPG is LAUGHABLE. The same attributes are why the Veloster N could not sell well, and there are plenty used online. * I drove the (hatchback wagon-not SUV) Kona N and was extremely unimpressed for all these reasons. The seats are ridiculously cheap. Hyundai put ZERO EFFORT into improving the interior. The profit built into this car's COVID ERA PRICING is outlandish and will be the downfall. Remember. THIS IS NOT AN SUV. Auto industry writers mistakenly called it that, but you realize that in the first ten seconds standing in front of it. Spend your money on something else that won't depreciate 5 GRAND in the first year, just like the Veloster N.