Hyundai’s super-efficient 2020 Sonata Hybrid sedan is best in class

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  A styling sedan that sips fuel? The 2020 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid really impressed us in testing. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

It seems like every article we write explaining just how good Korean cars have become is met with surprise. Well, I'm ready for more shocked faces, because I just spent a week with a 2020 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, and the tl;dr is that it is spectacular. It's handsome, well put-together, boasts some nifty driver-assist tech, and best of all, it sips gas, averaging a combined 52mpg (4.5L/100km). Not bad for a sedan that starts at $27,750.

To be fair, I expected the Sonata Hybrid to be good. An hour spent in the not-hybrid Sonata as part of the judging process for the World Car Awards in late 2019 suggested that the Camry and Accord should both be scared. As for the Sonata's hybrid version, I first saw it at this year's Chicago Auto Show, where it stood out against a sea of pedestrian-terrifying SUVs and trucks.

The Sonata is a sleek-looking thing, with a hint of techno catfish to it, thanks to visual whiskers that appear where the chrome cuts through the hourglass grille at its narrowest. I also love the way the daylight-running LEDs blend into strips of chrome as they make their way toward the A pillars. Other design details tell of the wind tunnel and fluid-dynamics simulations in a server farm, rather than the whimsy of a design sketch—the disc-like wheels, for instance, or the spikes on the tail lights that work like hostile architecture but for vortices instead of homeless people.

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