Hyundai Coupe 2.7 V6 Yellow | Shed of the Week
Remember when Hyundai was a complete novice at building fast cars?
Well now, what have we here, this rakish vision of loveliness cloaked in bright yellow? No, it’s not Shed in his hi-viz jacket and trews but a Hyundai Coupe in its original believe-it-or-not yellow.
Or is it? The Coupe was called the Tiburon, the Spanish word for shark, in most places apart from Europe where after much thought and no doubt countless high-powered meetings they came up with the Coupe name. This particular car was first registered in the UK in July 2005, but it has ’T’ for Tiburon badges front and rear and on the steering wheel, giving it an importy vibe.
In another brilliant stroke of marketing genius Hyundai gave the UK-spec car in this colour its own name, viz the 2.7 V6 Yellow, quite a good clue not only that it was yellow but also that it had the optional 2.7 ‘Delta’ V6 engine. Much like Shed himself this was a short-stroke unit, very oversquare at 86.7mm x 75mm and needing 6,000rpm on the clock to reach its maximum output of 172hp. Peak torque was 181lb ft at 4,000rpm. Shed’s eyes nearly exploded from the effort of looking at the blurry pic of the gearknob on his grime-encrusted Amstrad screen but after liberal applications of Optrex he managed to discern that it does have the 6-speed manual that came in on UK cars after the GK’s 2005 facelift rather than the earlier 5-speeder.
Although it had character in the '00s, and arguably more so now, the V6 was at heart a cruising engine. With the manual 'box in place (an auto was also available) this front-wheel drive car weighing under 1,350kg had a 0-60mph time in the high sevens and a top speed of 137mph. You wouldn’t want to go barrelling into too many bumpy corners though as the chassis was sub-optimal at pothole absorption.
The Coupe’s styling was well-liked at the time though. Does it stand up still? You’ll have your own views on that, but wouldn’t it be fun to go to the local Max Power meet or equivalent, open the bonnet and proudly display the engine, positioned not in the more usual central position but jauntily off to the side in front of the driving seat. Pundits like to wibble on about front-to-back weight distribution but for Shed side-to-side is far more important when Mrs Shed is in the passenger seat, so he likes the rebalancing look of this drivetrain layout.
There wasn’t much room in the back of the Coupe, and the sunshine roof made things worse. You had to look at it as a two plus two really. The seats themselves were well rated in period. Today they come across as quite plasticky but it is actually leather. Years ago somebody told Shed that Korean cows liked the taste of bubblewrap and that other packing material that looks like Quavers.
Obviously modern-looking infotainment screens hadn’t been invented by 2005. This car’s aftermarket unit is a neat installation if you can get past the yellowness, but Shed is wisely girding his wrinkly loins against the expected barrage of sneery flat-roofed pub pelters. As a distraction technique, Shed says he is reasonably sure that the vehicle falls into the money-saving K* bracket for cars producing more than 225g/km (it’s 250g/km) and registered before 23 March 2006. Unfortunately, he’s been reasonably sure about this many times before, only to be repeatedly exposed as an idiot by the forum. If by some freakish chance he’s actually got it right this time that means an annual tax bill of £415, which is £300 or so lower than the cost of some recent sheds.
Some rust in the rear suspension mounting area was addressed last summer. With that done it got through the MOT test on the second go, but an advisory remained for non-threatening corrosion. That’s not going to cure itself, so you’ll have to decide if this 115,000-mile car is worth the risk at £1,995. All Shed will say is that manual 2.7s have extreme rarity on their side. This Yellow was the only manual 2.7 Coupe on sale in the UK at the time of writing. The other three 2.7 autos that Shed found were all priced at more than £2k, with no guarantee of any of them being any less crusty than this one. One of them – which had had some back-end de-rusting work carried out in 2021 – was nearly £3,300.
As regular readers will know, rare birds are Shed’s favourites and these Hyundais certainly fit into that category. He can’t tell you exactly or even roughly how many are left in the UK because the website that’s supposed to help him with that is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. He could lay out some cash on a more useful database, but as his few friends will tell you he is tighter than a verucca sock so there’s no chance of that happening.
For context I had a BMW E30 with a 2.7 conversion that out performs this lump on every metric and was 20 years older.
V6 was lazy but felt faster on the move, possibly because you're sitting quite low.
No headroom if you're over 6ft.
Post 2006 facelift brought the darker, shark eyes headlights which looked far better.
Yellow outside - yes please. Yellow inside - no thanks. Black wheels- you decide.
And finally, yes, we all know Honda got 240bhp or so from the contemporary 2.0 VTEC in an S2000 or whatever, but Hyundai had committed to an all inclusive 5 year warranty by this point, when some others were still on 1 year, so they designed in some conservatism.
I remember thinking how nice these looked when they first came out, like a scaled down Ferrari 550.
This one could do with a bit de-naffing but it does hold a little bit of appeal. Not one of those sheds that has me wondering if I could sneak it onto the drive though.
But for me this car was at the wrong side of the transition, a very mediocre car that could be bettered by others and made little sense to me - I was surprised how many I used to see though so what did I know.
It reminds me of a custard coloured Corsa that my mother in-law once had. She asked me to valet as she was wanting to sell it. I went over to look at it and the whole of one side was covered in splashes of green fence paint. 2 hours later it was as clean as a whistle but my sheepish looking father in law was still trying to blame the neighbour for the paint splashes!
Even at 3 years old, one owner, fresh MOT and a FSH it was hard to sell because of the yellow exterior paint.
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