Dear Scotty,
For my first vehicle, I purchased a 2010 Hyundai Accent Blue. It has about 150K miles on it. It has the tall gear ratios and 5 speed transmission. It has crank windows, no power locks, and not a whole lot else. I'm planning on doing the timing belt and water pump soon, along with other incidentals and belts. It's mostly clean underneath, and doesn't burn oil. It runs smoothly and drives straight. I paid 3500. Besides the commonplace coil issue, what else should I look out for on the car? I've heard most people saying that the older Accents were pretty well made. Keep or sell?
Well, look the 2010 model year Hyundai Accent is third generation launched in 2005.
This generation has a few main issues, the first one being that the 1.6L Hyundai Alpha engine has a timing BELT and it is an interference engine, this is a critical maintenance item you should take care of if you keep the car!! - but note that other than that, it's a half decent engine, just make sure your one doesn't burn oil and replace the oil frequently (at most 4.5k miles)
But the main issue is the manual gearbox - these are known to fail when mated to the 1.6L! Hyundai generally does not make manual or automated manual transmissions I'd consider decent.
Another serious flaw of this generation is complete lack of safety - it had a very bad performance in the IIHS test.
It's also worth mentioning that the 3rd generation Hyundai Accent falls significantly short of its competition, it's no match, not even close to how good the Civic and Corolla of the time were. It's hard to even compare. and I'm saying that as someone who used to own a Hyundai Accent (although it was a completely different generation) and liked it.
In other words, this is an extraordinarily sub-par car that requires maintenance, has a time-bomb transmission and is generally unsafe. I would see if it's possible to upgrade to a Corolla or a Civic from a similar year, BUT if there's no such possibility than if you don't drive much and drive moderately, maybe it's not too bad.
