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1 month with Hyundai i20 N Line DCT: Little accident, 4 pros and 4 cons

27th April 2023, 14:07 by Utkarsh Chaudhary

While my Maruti Swift kept me absolutely satisfied for around 1 lakh km, I wanted to upgrade to a more fun-to-drive car with over 100 bhp.

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Greetings, fellow members and reader

A brief roundup of my automotive history

I have always been a big automotive enthusiast for as long as I can remember, be it my childhood days while being schooled in the Gulf spotting Land Cruisers and Camaros or the first Maruti 800 bought in the family. These days my daily travel totals up to about 75-100kms of happy highway miles mixed with some sore traffic jams in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

My first truly personal car a 2015 Mitsubishi Outlander, bought pre-owned under the assumption it was a well-kept car, turned out to be a borderline salvaged repaired car. Managed to run that for around 2 years from 2016 to 2018 going through multiple engine and suspension issues with random hose leaks and breakdowns every other day. It was further made worse by a non-existent dealer or OEM service/spare network. Truly loved the car, still miss it every day. Would've found a way to keep it if Mitsubishi was still around.

Forward to 2018, the constant thought of being stranded by the roadside in my lemon car got the better of me, finally we decided to scrap the Outlander and get something a little more sensible for 10 lakhs OTR. Without much confusion, the Swift, Baleno and i20 Elite were tested with the Swift making the cut due to the shortest waiting and offers at the time. A cherry red Swift zxi+ was brought home in August 2018 as the silver Outlander said its last goodbye.

While it did feel a bit unnatural to go from an SUV to a city hatch, the grunt from the beautiful petrol engine and the lightweight car itself made it feel like a go-kart on steroids, add to it the slick manual gearbox which was much much better than the rubbery CVT I was accustomed to on the Outlander.

Before I knew it, my aspirations changed from owning a rugged SUV to finding and shortlisting future hot hatches. The Swift kept me absolutely satisfied for about 105,000kms of city use until 2023 post which the maintenance cost increased significantly to which the Maruti service representatives simply said - Sir it's a Maruti, one lakh kilometers is enough, aur kya expect karoge? Which led me to scout for potential replacements.

The criteria to be met

Must be fun to drive as a city car. ie- >100bhp.
Preferred hatch, sedan acceptable.
Automatic preferred, not mandatory.
Must have better build and paint quality relative to Maruti.
OTR price around 15 lakhs, <15lakhs preferred.

The replacements considered

Venue Nline.
i20 Nline.
Slavia/Virtus 1.0.
Honda City CVT

The Venue felt like a cramped-up i20 on stilts, the VW twins felt like a compromise on German build quality was genuinely expecting better from the cabin, the Honda City still felt like a car from 2020 with that creamy engine but dated interiors. Through the process of elimination and test drives, the i20 Nline N8 DCT was finalized.

Since we had also bought an Elite i20 petrol from the dealership in 2021, Hyundai was a trusted brand in the family and there were no second thoughts about reliability or build quality. A test drive was taken, a rather long one, the car left me thoroughly impressed and the token was paid the same day with delivery promised in 2-3 days of Polar white or Starry night color, given that banking work was taken care of.

Come 22nd March 2023, the car was delivered in under a week as promised, with some delay due to holidays. A shining polar white i20 Nline DCT came home.

The likes

The engine gearbox combo. Just perfect for city and nearby runs.
The OG steering wheel from the i20N sold overseas. Beautiful!
The interiors are sorted, modern yet well put together.

The dislikes

The tyres. Not enough grip + lots of road noise.
The headlights, not strong enough for highway runs.
The fuel efficiency, if driven enthusiastically it drops all the way down to 7-7.5kmpl!! I used to get 14kmpl from my little Maruti go-kart. Quite shocking.

First thing I did was to get the car ceramic coated to try and preserve the factory sheen of the paint. Got it done at a studio for 18k for 5 years package with annual touchups, 9H was the brand I believe. Here's the result:

As fate would have it, I had a little mishap in the first week of ownership just a day after ceramic coating was done when on a rural motorway, a family of pigs decided to stop mid-road and turn back to make a run, resulting on a hit and a broken bumper with fender. This would leave the car in the workshop for the next 12 days due to a lack of parts plus holidays for the financial year-end.

Fast forward the next 10 days, marks a month of ownership of my beautiful white steed, with no major complaints as a customer. Have completed just over 1700 kms in around 20 days with an average of 10.5kmpl feather footed driving so far, hoping to do thousands more with a smile plastered on my face. Will do my best to keep the thread updated timely!

Here’s the short-term pros and cons in a nutshell so far.

Pros

The suspension is sorted, just the right amount of stiffness to avoid swaying as well as handling rough patches.
The raspy exhaust note, while being barely audible inside, is rather exciting on the outside. Good job insulating the interiors I guess!
The speaker setup is good for an audiophile as OEM, just wish it had more tuning options provided. The bass is good, the lows often end up muddled.
The car stays planted on the highway, the cruise control is rather good too. Generally, it should be cancelled once you apply brakes, but in this case, it will re-accelerate once you take your foot off the brake and come to the set level again rather convenient.

Cons

The alloys aren’t aesthetically as pleasing as they should be on a pseudo-hot hatch. Will change soon.
A real lack of tuning options, no tune available for gearbox, a generic remap available for the 1.0 tgdi engine globally that takes it to 128-130bhp. Not sure how the gearbox will react to it.
The iffy reliability of DCT gearboxes in India historically, have bought the extra warranty from Hyundai. Hopefully, in case it does happen, they will handle things better than VW.
Wish it had illuminated driver-side door switches and all one-touch power up-down windows. Little things go a long way!