Don’t you just hate it when they take something you love and change it for the worse? Henry Ford didn’t upgrade his Model T by reverting to a steam engine, and nobody tries to build wide-body jetliners with propeller engines any more, so why did Hyundai South Africa take that lovely six-speed manual gearbox out of its Tiburon 2,7 and replace it with an auto — a four-speed, on top of it all?
Four-speed autos are horrid, because they always seem to be in the wrong gear, and now they’ve gone and stuffed one into a car that I’ve long rated as one of my favourites because it was so much fun and such good value for money.
Hyundai’s Stanley Anderson says the gearbox swap came about purely because of customer feedback. Perhaps so — Jo’burg traffic’s got so heavy these days that manual gearboxes and heavy clutches are fast losing favour, but I don’t live in Jo’burg and I don’t have to worry about traffic. Give me back my gearbox!
The original Tiburon was born in 1996, and the current version hove over the South African horizon in 2003 to gain a fair-sized cult-following straight away. It looked pretty good, it handled like a dream, it felt like a real sports car, and it was reasonably affordable.
I particularly liked the 2,7 with its six-speed box, although I thought its 129kW and 250Nm could do with a 20% boost to make the car even better. The two-litre wasn’t bad either at the price, but a car that looks as good as this and scuttles around corners so well deserves more than 102kW/185Nm.
The facelifted Tiburon launched in Johannesburg last week uses the same engines as the 2006 version, but the front and rear ends have been revamped slightly, and new 17” alloy wheels fitted.
The journalists at the launch had mixed feelings about the new styling, which isn’t radically different to the old, and I decided that I preferred the old front section with the new rear. We used the two-litre versions at the soon-to-be-closed Wesbank Raceway, doing one of Grant McCleery’s Driving Dynamics performance driving courses, and the cars still handle as well as I remember, but are no quicker than they used to be.
I believe that the Korean factory is planning on slotting a 3,8-litre V6 into the next-generation Tiburon for 2009, which should be worth waiting for.
Priced at R219 900 for the two-litre and R269 900 for the 2,7-litre V6, the Hyundai Tiburon is still good value for money. Trouble is, if you buy one, you can have to choose between the rather anaemic two-litre with a five-speed manual transmission or the more promising 2,7 lumbered with a four-speed auto. Perhaps if I lived in Jo’burg …