When I drove the Hyundai Venue iMT for the first time way back in August 2020, I liked the new technology but wasn’t unsure about the long-term effectiveness and even the reliability of this functionality. The Venue 1.0 Turbo iMT arrived in our long term fleet a few months back and I’ve been driving it daily from home to work and back.
Jumping straight to the gearbox in question, I have actually started liking the iMT a lot more than I expected myself to and I love how it feels so easy to drive the car around. The gearshifts happen in a jiffy, there’s no extra lag and the whole clutch-less operation is indeed very smooth. People familiar with Mumbai’s stop-go traffic would understand the banes of driving a manual car.
The iMT makes sure that your left leg takes a break while driving and you still get manual control over the engine. What I noticed is that the car does tend to feel a little jerky at speeds below 20 km/hr in 1st and 2nd gears but after that it drives in a very smooth fashion. I loved the convenience of single-footed driving and it barely took me any time to get used to the iMT.
I’m sure you would like to know about the real-world fuel efficiency figures with the iMT-Turbo combo. With the tank-to-tank method, I managed to extract 11.9 km/l in a mix of city traffic and highway runs with a fair amount of spirited driving. Being a turbo, the engine is quite sensitive to throttle inputs and does tend to gulp a lot more fuel in constant heavy traffic while it feels quite frugal on long highway runs. The engine is extremely responsive too and offers great performance once the turbo spools up and overall driveability levels are very nice.
The Hyundai Venue is a pretty-sorted car overall. The AC worked fabulously in the scorching summer but the TPMS warning light has been constantly on in the car’s tenure with us and we adjusted the tyre pressures multiple times but to no avail. Apart from this, no complaints at all. My car has done more than 26,000 kms on the odo now and has been driven by multiple other publications too, across various parts of the country, but it has held up pretty well.
Our test car is the Sport SX(O) Dual Tone variant which means it gets some red accents inside-out and the Creta’s steering wheel. I particularly like the fabric+leather layout of the seats which not only look nice but also feel comfortable to sit on for long drives without causing any sweating.
Hyundai is now gearing up to launch the 2022 Venue in a couple of days and the vehicle will have cosmetic changes, new features, driving modes and then some, so it is going to be interesting to check out that car. Even in its current form, the Venue does come across as a complete package and that’s evident from its sales numbers every month!
I mostly used my test car for work commutes only and just a couple of times I got a chance to take it out on leisure drives. However, with the onset of the monsoons, I do intend on driving it down to Lonavala in a couple of weeks purely for leisure with the agenda being to enjoy the drive and some piping hot pakoras on the way!
Further Reading –
Hyundai Venue vs Kia Sonet – Video