Thickly bumpered and roof-railed, the Hyundai i20 Active appears to be drawing its name and inspiration from what marketing people term the “active lifestyle” — the philosophy behind the packaging of so many of today’s cars. It supposes, on the part of the customer, a hectic but healthy schedule in which one occasionally finds a brief moment between bouts of mountain biking and white-water rafting to shop for fruit juice.
Is that you? It’s worth noting that being active in this context does not apparently preclude being passive enough to want to spare yourself the fag of walking by owning a car. And that’s definitely me — and, indeed, quite a lot of us.
Anyhow, here’s the i20 Active, which is to say Hyundai’s recently upgraded five-door, five-seat hatchback, rendered more ... well, active. Those all-important roof rails signal the possibility that you are the kind of person who can handle a kayak. And the muscly bumpers anticipate (while only partly protecting against) a regular and thorough buffeting from extreme terrains.
There are skid plates clamped to the car’s underside to prevent you (up to a point) from peeling the floor off whenever you go crumping across boulder-strewn fields. And, purely cosmetically, there are two round reflectors punched low down into the rear end, fresh 17in alloys ready to mince the air and a more than averagely butch fuel-filler cap for those more than averagely butch visits to the petrol station.
Given the amount of overt dressing-up that has gone on, there’s bound to be a touch of the carnival float about a project such as this — but then, who doesn’t enjoy a carnival float? The point is, by the addition of these simple, plastic bolt-ons, Hyundai takes a conscientious but frequently ignorable Korean hatchback and makes it look less so, and it would be hard to take exception to that.
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Thus, also does the company create for itself a plausible car in the crossover or shrunken SUV category, which is currently eating the marketplace whole.
And, yes, it’s a bit of a mock-up. For all the rural trim, the i20 Active is front-wheel drive only, with no 4x4 option — even in the form of a switch that you will never touch.
Sadly, my time at home with the i20 Active coincided with one of those rare weeks when there is no paragliding in the diary. I did, however, use the car to run people to two separate hospitals, to pay a family visit in darkest Essex and to taxi someone to a Frankie Boyle performance in Hammersmith, and that counts as active in its own way. The car performed these duties uncomplainingly, scaling the clifflike traffic-calming devices of London with aplomb and cruising the A12 with a companionably low hum. The steering wasn’t that sharp and the suspension was stiff, but the gearbox was softly compliant. There’s not much flair or zip, maybe, but there’s a reassuring feeling of competence and a surprising aura of good quality at something close to VW levels.
Mind you, given that the ambition is presumably to lure in some younger customers and prevent their gaze from falling too long upon the far funkier Renault Captur, you wonder whether the interior had to be quite so plain. Brighter contrasts may well be available, but mine was essentially two shades of grey. I slotted my phone into the plastic bracket plugged into the top of the dashboard and it became the only point of interest, like a Picasso hanging in an empty wardrobe. Those extra bits of plastic inside and out cost £1,200. Then again, the car does come with an active lifestyle, and some would say you can’t put a value on that.