Used Hyundai Kona cars for sale

Used Hyundai Kona pros and cons

Is a second hand Hyundai Kona a good car?

The Hyundai Kona is a medium-sized SUV, which is to say that it’s roughly half-way between the likes of the Ford Puma at one end, and the big Citroen C5 Aircross at the other. Does that make it the perfect middle ground? Or an irritating half-way house?

The Kona certainly looks rather more futuristic than before, with a cyclops-like LED light bar that runs across the nose, and chunky headlights set lower down on the bumpers. It’s a car that needs the right colour to look good, though — some shades make it look too plain. 

Get it right, though, and the Hyundai looks almost sci-fi, and it’s good on the inside too. There’s a pair of big screens for instruments and infotainment, lifted from bigger, more expensive models. Thankfully, Hyundai is one of those brands which realises that you still need proper physical buttons when you’re driving, so there are plenty of those too, which means you’re not constantly having to stare at on-screen menus. 

Overall quality is very good, even if you will find a few cheap plastics about the place. The Kona’s interior is much more conventional than its exterior, but instead of being boring, it comes across more as functional and sensible. We just wish it had fewer warning bing-bongs (it’s one of those cars that just likes to warn you about EVERYTHING) or just an easier way to switch them all off. 

It’s also very practical, with lots of big storage areas in the front, helped by the fact the automatic models move the gear selector behind the steering wheel, opening up vast spaces on the centre console. Manual gearbox versions must make do with less room, sadly. 

There’s lots of space in the back seats too, and a decent 466-litre boot. There’s no loading lip either, and an adjustable boot floor, so this is a very useful car.  

That said, its boot space is beaten by the similarly-priced, but bigger, Citroen C5 Aircross and the Citroen is the comfier car to drive too. It’s not that the Kona rides rock-hard, like a Porsche 911 GT3, but it’s quite firm and fidgety, as if Hyundai’s engineers set the suspension too stiff so as to control the weight of the hybrid engine’s battery. 

On the upside, that makes it a bit more entertaining in corners than you might expect, but actually the Kona’s best performance comes on the motorway, where it’s a smooth and refined long-distance cruiser.

There’s a choice of two petrol engines — a 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbo with 100hp, or a 1.6-litre four-cylinder turbo with 138hp — both of which come with a choice of six-speed manual or seven-speed dual clutch automatic gearboxes. Actually, when fitted with the auto box, the 1.0-litre petrol gets a power boost to 120hp.

Then there’s the Kona Hybrid, which is based around a 1.6-litre petrol engine, and which develops 141hp and has CO2 emissions of just 106g/km. Hyundai claims better than 60mpg for this model, but in reality you’re more likely to see economy hovering around the 50mpg mark. There’s an all-electric Kona too, but we’ll deal with that in a separate review. 

The Kona splits the difference in size between the Ford Puma and the Citroen C5 Aircross, and kind of splits them in terms of character too — although it’s closer to the softer Citroen most of the time.

What to look for when buying a used Hyundai Kona

This generation of Hyundai Kona is very new, so it’s hard to get a solid grip on what might go wrong with it. We do know from the previous model that the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox doesn’t like doing lots of slow stop-start miles, as that can cause premature ageing of the clutches. It won’t be an issue for this model yet, but beware of that later in its life. 

This version of the Hyundai Kona is too new to have appeared in the Driver Power Top 50 Cars To Own list, but Hyundai finished a solid mid-table 17th out of 32 brands in the Driver Power customer satisfaction survey, with 22% of owners reporting a problem with their car.

Of course, all versions of the current Kona will still be covered by their original five-year unlimited mileage warranty, which should give you some peace of mind.