2006 LX Sonata

If you have already bought it, it is kind of late to be asking about the good and bad points.

Matt

It's an honest car. Not many of those little "surprises" you find on a new car. If you drove it, you already know about everything.

My biggest annoyance? Having to use a step stool to wash the roof; a thunking noise in the rear suspension when driving over washboard roads at low speed.

You forgot the sloshing gas tank, touchy throttle, lousy cup holders and creak in the dash when you hit sharp bumps. :-)

Matt

And the sunglass holders that aren't large enough to hold most sunglasses.

Tell the dealer to have the service dept turn on the thingy which locks the doors when you reach 15mph. I hate that I have to go back for that, instead of them asking me up front.

I hadn't noticed that as I don't wear sunglasses. I have the photodarkening lenses in my normal glasses. :-)

I always hated cars (GM mainly) that did that. Fortunately, disabling it was easy on my minivans and my Sonata never did it to start with, and for that I'm VERY happy! :-)

Matt

To my utter delight, I have experienced none of those problems.

OK, I'm sure I have the lousy cup holder, but it doesn't matter. If I bring a cup of coffee near the Sonata, my wife gives me "the look".

That makes 2 of us. I never could imagine anyone running beside my car at

My Sonata is a "keeper", and I intend to run it until the wheels fall off. My previous 3 vehicles were kept 12, 11, and 11 years, so I will probably jeep it at least 10. I am wary of anything that is likely to fail before the car is 10 years old. The more gizmos you have, the more likely you will have grief with at least some of them over the lifetime of the car.

Yep, that is one reason I bought just the plain GL with standard shift and 4 cylinder engine. A lot less to fail than the GLS and LX. :-)

Plus, I bought it as a cheap commuter car so no use loading it up with options. I'm saving that for when I can afford a Vette. :-)

Matt

If the car was for me, I would have bought the cheapest available. Since it was for my wife to commute 20x2 miles a day, I was sort of forced to get a more mom-friendly package. :-)

I don't feel that modern automatics any longer have a significant reliability or economy disadvantage to manual. At least not like they did in the old days. I'm clipping along at 26 mpg, and looks like I'll hit 27 this tank. Only 1500 miles on the odo. If I can get 26-28 mpg with 70% highway driving I will be delighted. The car is high, wide, and has a very strong V6... not exactly mileage friendly.

I agree that the differences are much less than in days gone by, especially with regard to economy. However, I think that standard transmissions are still much more durable and they are much cheaper to start with (I think about $800 on the Sonata). I can't remember ever hearing of a manual transmission failure on a passenger car or pickup. I hear fairly often of automatic transmission failures, especially in the heavier front drive vehicles such as minivans. Now I realize that automatics outsell standards 10:1 or more, so you'd expect to hear about at least 10 times as many failures even if the reliabilities were equal. However, I still think a standard is much more reliable than an automatic and they require less and less expensive maintenance as well.

However, to me the economy and reliability are just nice side affects. I buy standard shift because I simply like to shift for myself.

Matt