JUNE 14 - 20 | 2019
Hyundai Kona pure electric Ŷ MORE THAN SKIN DEEP: Hyundai Kona has a new generation front end that may not appeal to some. The rest of the car looks great.
By EWAN KENNEDY model, with an RRP of $64,490 plus on-road charges. STYLING Can’t say the front appeals to me, a rounded bit of plastic with many oddly arranged indents. Okay, so the Kona Electric doesn't need a large grille to suck in huge amounts of air to burn in the engine, nor does it a lot of cooling. Therefore a large radiator isn't required. But radiator grilles aren’t on cars merely for engineering reasons. I see them as a sort of figurehead, one that has been crafted and revised by all automotive marques over many generations. Or am I living in the past and grilles will
disappear altogether with internal combustion engines? Anyhow, the rest of the Kona looks great outside and in, with a modern SUV look that has the wheelarches and sill panels in contrasting colours to give it a business-like appearance. POWERTRAIN Kona Electric is powered by a 150 kW electric motor running from a 64 kWh (kilowatt hours) lithium-ion polymer battery under the floor. The motor delivers peak torque of 395 Nm from one rpm (yes, one rpm) and has a real world electric driving range of 449 kilometres when measured on the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP). Our test was indicating 489km when we picked it up.
We averaged electricity consumption of 12.3 kWh per 100km. That was a fair bit under the 14.3kWh of the official testing. Plugged into a 100 kW DC fast-charger, Kona Electric can reach 80 per cent battery charge in 54 minutes. A 50kW DC charger takes 75 minutes to 80 per cent. An optional $1950 7.2 kW on-board charger allows charging when plugged into a household socket – that takes around 9 hours 35 minutes. It can even be charged by simply plugging into a 240-volt/10-amp household socket – that is if you've about 20 hours to spare. It’s a bit like using a mobile phone, iPad and so on. As soon as you're near a power source you plug it in.
Ŷ Continued page 2 j/21d12837-v75/23-19
THE first all-electric production car to go on sale in Australia was the Mitsubishi I-MiEV. In 2010 I picked up one from Mitsubishi in Brisbane and drove to our home on the Gold Coast – arriving there with just five kilometres to spare before the dash readout told me the batteries would be flat. That's nail biting territory … Last week I picked up a Hyundai Kona Electric from Brisbane, drove home along the same route – and arrived with 398 kilometres to ‘empty’. Such has been the advancement in electric car technology in nine years. See more details in the Driving section of the review. Hyundai Kona Electric is a pure electric vehicle, not a hybrid as it has no petrol engine. It's expensive – very expensive – our test car was the top grade Highlander
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