This week’s Chicago auto show saw a bevy of new small car unveilings, most notably the Hyundai Elantra coupe and hatchback, as well as the Kia Track’ster two-door mini-ute concept, diesel Beetle and Mopar-accessorized Dodge Dart and Fiat 500 models.
The Elantra hatchback will replace the 2012 Elantra Touring wagon, which is still based on the previous-generation body style, and not the more modern “fluidically sculpted” Elantra that battled the Honda Civic for the best-selling car in Canada title for much of 2011. The new Elantra hatchback is a hot-looking compact car, based closely on the i30 hatchback sold already in Europe and elsewhere.
The Elantra Hatchback will provide Hyundai once more with a new body style that the Civic doesn’t offer, but is popular in key rivals such as the Mazda3 and Ford Focus, and even Toyota with its Matrix version of the Corolla.
The sexier two-door Elantra coupe will also help Hyundai’s pursuit of this title, as the Civic is one of the few players in this market that offers a compact coupe. It speaks to Hyundai’s confidence in its products and styling acumen that Hyundai would launch this coupe even as its three-door Veloster Turbo and refreshed rear-wheel-drive Genesis Coupe are coming to market.
The new Hyundai Elantra sedan.— Hyundai
Kia’s Track’ster concept may have two-doors, but this lowered and slammed two-door version of the Soul is no coupe. Created in Kia’s California design studio, the boxy concept is designed to showcase what a sporting version of the subcompact Soul crossover could look like.
Featuring about 250 hp, Kia says there are no plans to put it into production. But it does acknowledge that it is looking at various production derivatives of the California-designed Soul, including a convertible version based on the Soul’ster concept, which is under “final assessment for production.”
The diesel Volkswagen Beetle will not look much if any different from its gasoline counterpart, but should provide notably lower fuel bills, with European mileage figures reported at 8.1 litres/100 km city and 6.0 highway. It’s slated to go on sale in the summer, with the same 2.0-litre, 140-hp TDI engine as in the Jetta and Golf.
As for Chrysler, with Mopar celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, expect to see many Chrysler and Fiat vehicles given special Mopar treatments this year. Even newly unveiled ones such as the Dodge Dart, which doesn’t go on sale until closer to mid-year, showcased a special edition ‘GTS 210 Tribute’ edition using a sampling of the 150 accessories Mopar will offer for it, including a performance kit that increases its power from a stock 184 hp to the 210 reflected in its name.
A bright-yellow Fiat 500 ‘Stinger’ edition with black accents inside and out was also shown. An unspecified but certainly more modest power bump-up was available from this kit’s cold-air intake and performance exhaust, leaving the upcoming Fiat 500 Abarth’s 160-hp turbocharged engine as the unchallenged top performer in the family.
Fisker hit by cash crunch
Fisker has reportedly cut back its U.S. production and engineering operations due to a cash crunch, laying off 66 employees and contractors, while renegotiating a half-billion-dollar loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The $529-million (U.S.) loan was to support production of the plug-in Fisker Karma sedan, a shapely full-size extended range sedan that sells for about $100,000, as well as the more affordable mid-size Nina sedan that’s to be built in the U.S. This comes less than a week after Fisker announced the Karma was officially on sale in Canada, with retail locations either up or going up soon in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
