Would you drive a car that didn’t have an instrument cluster? It’s hard to imagine skipping such an essential feature of a vehicle, but that’s already a reality today. As first reported by Motor1, an instrument display isn’t standard equipment anymore on the all-new Hyundai Elantra (aka Avante) in its home market of South Korea.
The slim 9.9-inch instrument display shows the vehicle’s current speed, fuel level, and fuel consumption as well as the local speed limit—information also found on the main screen running Hyundai’s proprietary infotainment OS, Pleos Connect. In other words, skipping the instrument display means you’ll have to look at the middle of your dashboard while driving.
PHOTO BY Hyundai
The Elantra starts at KRW23,980,000 (around P1,121,000) with the Modern trim, and adding the instrument display is an extra KRW350,000 (around P16,360). Worse for the midrange Premium variant, the instrument display is only available in a bundle with the infotainment screen size upgrade, which adds a KRW830,000 (around P38,800) premium to the KRW27,710,000 (around P1,296,000) sticker price.
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The instrument display is only standard equipment on the Elantra’s range-topping Inspiration trim, which stickers for KRW31,520,000 (around P1,474,000). Interestingly enough, the Elantra’s ADAS suite comes standard across all trims. This includes features like lane-keeping assist, collision-avoidance systems, and driver monitoring. Given Hyundai’s heavy emphasis on making its vehicles defined by software, these features are likely baked into Pleos Connect itself and can’t be portioned out to be sold at a premium.
PHOTO BY Hyundai
PHOTO BY Hyundai
It’s the same story for the Elantra hybrid, which starts at KRW30,420,000 (around P1,422,500) and tops out at KRW36,990,000 (around P1,730,000). The hybrid lineup has the same three trims, and the same instrument display upcharges if not opting for the top-of-the-line option.
The case of the missing instrument display isn’t unique to the Elantra, either, as the Ioniq 3’s base trim in the UK market also skips it. After a bit of fiddling around in the configurator, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add an instrument display to the base Ioniq 3, except for moving up to one of the higher-level variants.
PHOTO BY Hyundai
To be clear, this move doesn’t take away functionality since Hyundai’s Pleos Connect can still serve up the same information on the central screen. It’s just not nearly as intuitive or ergonomic to have to glance away from the road and onto the laptop-sized screen on the dashboard. Even if this drives cost down for both Hyundai and its customers, it just sounds like a bad idea overall, and we hope this doesn’t catch on with other manufacturers.
What say you, though? Would you skip the instrument panel if it slashed a couple thousand pesos off the sticker price? Leave your reactions in the comments.
PHOTO BY Hyundai