Tease after tease has finally brought us to the official unveiling of the Hyundai i30 N. The automaker pulled the wraps off its new hot hatch in the form of a video of the car tearing up a racetrack. Refreshingly, there’s nothing in the video about stats or features and there’s nobody talking about the car—it’s just a raw visual experience of the car doing what it was designed to do.
In the video we hear lots of satisfying exhaust noise, we see composed handling in the corners, and we finally get a look at the uncamouflaged body. The i30 N has a subdued, yet aggressive look. The sportiness of the styling is somewhere between a GTI and a Focus ST. To the untrained eye, it just looks like some Hyundai hatchback, but there are enough styling cues to note its performance to those who know what it is.
Like in previous teasers, this video spends a lot of time showing us the shifter. Hyundai really wants enthusiasts to know that this car comes with a 6-speed manual transmission, for which we are grateful. The rest of the interior includes aggressively bolstered seats, aluminum pedals, an “N” steering wheel, a sporty gauge cluster, and an infotainment screen with “N mode” that shows us a performance timer, g-force gauge, and little meters for turbo, torque, and power.
Under the hood lies a 2.0-liter T-GDI turbo-four cranking out 271 horsepower and 260 lb-ft of torque making it plenty competitive with the other hot hatches on the market. The i30 N is front-wheel drive with an electronic limited-slip differential.
Sadly, we won’t be getting this spicy hatch in the US. What we do have is the Elantra GT (it’s called the i30 in the rest of the world) which this car is based on. It’s a bummer, but we get why they aren’t bringing it to America. Nobody in the States really sees Hyundai as a performance brand. However, Hyundai intends to change that with more “N” cars coming in the near future.
