Views on my restored Hyundai Sonata V6 after spending some time with it

If you're travelling on a decent road, the car is eerily silent. It's on par with our much more modern 2017 Honda Jazz.

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Hello all,

It's been 2 months since the car came back home, and my experience driving the Sonata has been nothing short of exemplary. Here are some more pros and cons of the car now that I've spent sufficient time and mileage with it.

Pros:

• Discreet looks. She doesn't scream for attention, quite the opposite. I like that - it's a total sleeper. The hood ornament gets a lot of attention though.

• Sublimely smooth engine and gearbox. The ATF change has eliminated even the minor jerks that accompanied gear shifts. Considering that only perhaps 60% of the fluid in the car is actually changed, this is terrific. We're going to swap out the oil once again post 1000 km.

• Absolute silence when driving. If you're travelling on a decent road, the car is eerily silent. It's on par with our much more modern '17 Honda Jazz.

Cons:

• Near-zero engine braking! This irritates me no end! As a seasoned hypermiler, I'm well-versed with the idea that basically using brakes in your car hampers fuel efficiency and that you should allow your vehicle to coast to a stop (while using correspondingly moderate throttle inputs to get to speed). It's the reason I get astounding FE on all vehicles I drive. But the Sonata's ECU map seems to be calibrated to basically maintain any speed you drive at, because it shows barely any engine braking! I HAVE to use the brakes to slow down. This is so wasteful! I'm certain that I could easily get a 10% higher FE if the engine allowed the car to slow down. The only other way to use engine braking is to shift to Sport mode and downshift manually. I even plan highway manoeuvres with engine braking, but not with this car! I spoke with my friend who works as a powertrain engineer in the UK about this and his comment sums it up well - "Bro, this car was built at a time when fuel was a lot cheaper than it is now."

• Ride quality. It's surprisingly harsh, coming from a luxury sedan. Could it be due to the Monroe shocks instead of the Hyundai ones? Possibly. But I can feel every bump on the road (again this is like our Honda Jazz' bouncy ride). High-speed stability is top-notch, though.

Minor scare on an outstation trip

On another run to Jamnagar, I parked my car there only to see a small puddle of oil below the car! I puckered up because well, let's just say I'd been driving enthusiastically on the way there, and to do that while the car was low on oil would be a disaster! I checked both ATF and engine oil levels; both were OK.

Then I immediately called up my mechanic who was taken aback and asked me to get under the car and double check. Without any jack, going under the car meant I couldn't even turn my face sideways without touching the underbelly of the car! It was a little claustrophobic. The oil filter was completely devoid of any oil leaks, as was the underside of the trans. An inspection of the engine bay yielded nothing.

I could only conclude that the puddle was from some other vehicle that was parked there prior to my car! What's more, I moved the car further up and checked again the next morning, and everything was dry underneath.

Other updates

Moving on, I'm facing a rodent problem and am wondering how to solve that. I can see chewed bits of foam littered around the seats and it's giving me anxiety issues. For now, I've resorted to keeping rat poison in the footwells.

The cooling system overhaul and service have benefited the car's cooling greatly. I swear I can see the temp gauge reading just a little lower, perpetually than where it used to sit before the system was flushed. What's more, the issue with the hot air coming from the AC vents has completely disappeared! I can only guess that there was a hot spot somewhere in the cooling system or the heating coil which is now solved.

Aux cable attempt failed!

I bought a DIN M-type cable referenced in an earlier post, that fits directly into the port of the CD changer's socket on the back of the OE head unit. However, it doesn't work - the first time I plugged it into my phone I got a message stating "headphones not supported" and the second time the phone rebooted itself! ₹800 gone down the drain.

Taking transmission oil filtering into my own hands

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the OE ATF filter is located at such a place in the transmission that you literally have to take the trans apart to replace this. I took inspiration from what Honda does - they use an inline transmission filter that's part of the oil feed lines running to the cooler. I bought this filter through a friend in the US for USD 26. I'll install it after the second ATF oil flush post 1000km of driving, on the return line from the cooler.

Some work that's been done to the car

• New 68Ah battery installed. The cranking was somewhat weak and the car could have continued with the old battery, but I didn't want to take chances since I use the car for highway trips. Turns out the previous owner installed a downsized 55Ah battery instead of the 68Ah recommended in the manual. I bought Tata Green PREMIO 70D23L-BH.

• Last bit of rotten bodywork is patched. The rotten bit below the battery tray is patched for good. (You can see this previous post where it's clearly visible). This finally concludes the bodywork to be done to the car.

Here's what it looks like now from up top:

The view from down below:

• The speaker "issue" is solved. I'm embarrassed to be writing this, but the electrical issues we were trying to hunt down causing only 1 speaker out of 4 to work, actually was just the L/R balance knob turned all the way to one side! We went to a local car audio shop and he centered the knob and everything started working! I can't believe I didn't even think about it!

The car is 99% done

I can now confidently say that the car is nearly fully complete. There are some very minor electrical niggles that were there right when I bought the car, and those haven't gone away - there's an intermittent TCS light, and there's an intermittent transmission error wherein the gearshift indicator displays "E" when in first gear and then continues to shift normally anyway. Both go away when the car is restarted, and occur infrequently (perhaps 20% of the time.) An OBD scan didn't catch anything so this is something we'll look at later, when my mechanic is free.

The car also needs a new windscreen - perhaps when I recover from this project financially...

I'll share the costs incurred for this project, shortly, as I'm almost done summarising everything.

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