This was my first family car, as it turned out. It carried our daughter, dog, and gear on many road trips - to beaches, theme parks, relatives' homes. We could load it up with a luggage, beach chairs, the dog's bed, food and drinks, and whatever else we needed. It always got good gas mileage and ran smoothly. As a four-cylinder SUV with a sedan chassis, it combined the best of both worlds - the performance of an SUV at the price of a sedan. We looked at many comparable vehicles which were 25-50% more expensive, and I'm glad that we settled on this one. This wasn't our first Hyundai, and it probably won't be our last. It's not a luxury car by any means, but we were never afraid to get it dirty after soccer games, sandy after beach trips, sticky after food dropped on the floor, or whatever else. It has really been the ideal vehicle for a family in many regards. If I had to complain about anything, it would be the fact that the door-lock system stopped working several years ago, and because it's an intermittent flaw the dealer was never able to address it, so I often have to manually lock and unlock one or more doors. Otherwise, though, maintenance has been very limited; we stuck to the prescribed ongoing maintenance schedule for the first 80,000 miles or so, and have done only as-needed work since then (we are close to 120,000 miles as I write this).

This is a reliable car that gets decent fuel economy. I can get about 27 mpg highway and city combined on average. It has a good amount of power and lots of space. It was a top safety pick in 2006.