How Hyundai Is Changing The 2024 Elantra N
Hyundai's latest visual revisions to the Elantra N sports sedan have been unveiled at the Shanghai Motor Show on Tuesday, April 18, 2023. While we don't have any details on the technical or spec updates Hyundai has undertaken, the new visuals give us plenty to be excited about.
The Elantra N is Hyundai's compact performance sedan. 2023's Elantra N came in at a starting MSRP of just $32,000 while Hyundai purposefully draws comparisons between it and the Volkswagen Golf and Jetta GTI. The outgoing 2023 model is powered by a turbo-charged 2.0-liter in-line-four motor that puts down 276 hp and 289 lb.-ft. of torque, bringing the Elantra N to 60 mph in right around five seconds. Hyundai's N Corner Carving Differential, an electronic limited-slip differential, enhances the fun with torque vectoring, all the while maintaining an impressive level of practicality and efficiency, especially considering its sporty intentions.
While the 2023 Hyundai Elantra certainly isn't ugly, its visuals were due for an upgrade, and Hyundai seems to have realized this, delivering much-needed changes to a very vanilla design. Perhaps the most noticeable change has been to the wheels, with the new Elantra showing off a set of silver 19-inch alloys with a circular five-spoke design and a separate set of black ten-spoke alloys with a triangular pattern.
A sharp visual upgrade in addition to stylish new wheels
At first glance, you might think there's not much going on with the 2024 Hyundai Elantra, and you'd be both right and wrong. While the silhouette is largely unchanged, some minor, but significant updates have been made to the front — namely to the logo, grille, and headlights. Overall, the new Elantra looks like a much more serious machine. Gone are the swooping lines and organic patterns, replaced instead by something cleaner and more aggressive.
Perhaps the most immediately obvious change, the grille, has been changed from a soft, uniform, black affair with a sort of organic spiderweb patterned grid to a simpler pattern with sharp, straight lines and a prominent black bar separating the top and bottom. In addition to a new grille design, the new Elantra's slim headlights have a far less dramatic swoop to them, now wrapping around the side of the front bumper and joined in the middle by a light bar. The top half of the grille has gotten slimmer, while the bottom has grown, giving the face of the vehicle a much more aggressive, look, bringing the visual weight down to the bottom of the grille, resulting in a sportier look altogether.
All of these seemingly small changes that have been made to the Elantra add up to a much more striking look and brings it more in line with the design language you see in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 5.