White goodies: Hyundai i30N Fastback vs Kia Proceed GT

It’s an overused cliché to bring up the Korean car industry’s past and marvel with condescending exclamations such as ‘look how far they’ve come!’ and ‘didn’t they do well?’. It’s a hurdle that’s very hard to avoid tripping over when you stand and ogle this pair, though.

In the Hyundai i30N Fastback and Kia Proceed GT we have two circa-30 grand niche performance cars, ones that look so well-resolved that if you’d seen their designs five years ago, shorn of badges, you’d have guessed they came from traditionally desirable carmakers and costing twice as much money.

Photography: Mark Fagelson & Jonathan Fleetwood

Being cynical, you could say they’re just slightly less chintzy takes on the Mercedes CLA in both its saloon and shooting brake forms, but to these eyes the i30N and Proceed are significantly more appealing than a curiously banana-shaped Merc. Not least because, AMG CLAs aside, they have more exhilarating hardware.

The i30N is most familiar and thus the easiest place to start. Take Hyundai’s regular hot hatchback in 271bhp Performance form, add 12cm to its length, 69 litres to its boot space and £500 to its price. The Fastback is still a five-door, just with an elongated rear that gives the impression of being a saloon. An i30N Longtail, if you will.

But while McLaren’s LTs go hardcore, Hyundai’s unknowing tribute is actually a wee bit softer. The i30N’s riotously firm ride has been calmed down in the adaptive suspension’s Normal mode and there’s a bit more stability when the car’s reaching its grip limit.

The latter is most tangible, the Fastback a bit less eager to lift a rear wheel or indulge you with a bit of opposite lock when you corner aggressively. But the margins are slim, and exhibited only in extremity; in reality, this feels exactly as boisterous, effervescent and downright hilarious to hustle along as the hatchback, the sports exhaust strapped to its turbocharged 2.0-litre barking away and its taut manual gearshift and chunkily weighted steering making you feel an integral part of keeping it on the straight and narrow.

It’s a joyous car to drive, free of some of the steely-eyed focus of a Civic Type R or the po-faced competency of a Golf R. It’s less hung up on grip or refinement and most concerned with simply being fun.

Like the i30N Performance hatchback, you’ve an almost infinite combination of chassis and engine set-ups to choose from, but you’ll quickly deduce how firm you like the suspension, how heavy the steering and how aggressive the throttle (and thus the rev-matching and exhaust) and apportion it all off to the shortcut button on the steering wheel.

Turning the stability control off really means it’s off, too, which is kinda rare in the realm of more practically-minded performance cars. This is a car with a ludicrous amount of equipment and a five-year warranty, but it’s been developed by proper enthusiasts. Come in expecting a mollycoddling family car and it could well feel a bit heavy-handed. We like that.

While the i30N does raw thrills, the Proceed GT is altogether calmer, smoother and more measured. It’s yet more practical than the Fastback, and nearly as voluminous as Kia’s proper Ceed estate, while offering similarly practical seat splits and suchlike. It just happens to look like a shrunken Panamera Sport Turismo, which is about as high as praise-for-the-aesthetics-of-estate-cars comes.

There are several engine options, topped by this 201bhp GT. That it costs similar money to the Fastback while offering three quarters of the power will grate with some, but it simply means the Proceed is free of the i30N’s wheelspin and torque steer when you’re too greedy with the throttle. Kia’s 1.6-litre turbo engine is nowhere as thrilling to rev as its Korean cousin’s 2.0, and that transmission really stifles the fun too, sometimes whirring its shifts like a CVT.

The car shifts up itself at the red line in manual mode, but the coarse noise and slightly suffocated feeling north of 6,000rpm means you’ve no desire to hang onto gears longer than necessary anyway. So it’s actually at its best when left in auto, and with the drivetrain’s Sport button pressed, it shifts quickly and intelligently.

If that all sounds a bit anti-enthusiast, then your worries can be partially assuaged by the GT’s expertly set-up chassis, possessing composure akin to a Golf GTI and an ability to shrug off bad roads and worse weather with more insouciance than the slightly handful Hyundai.

The Proceed’s seriously impressive, betraying the fact it too has the midas touch of ex-BMW M man Albert Biermann. It grips, grips and then grips a bit more, not willing to indulge mischief like the i30N, but still able to put a smile on your face, if stopping short of making you grin like an idiot.

That you’re left wishing the GT had the extra power it’s clearly capable of handling – from that Hyundai 2.0, perhaps – summarises both how flipping well set up it is and how tame it feels next to the i30N.

With such disparate attitudes on display, this is parts-sharing and badge engineering with far more depth and diversity than certain German competitors. Hyundai and Kia have shared a chassis development boss as well as numerous parts – their interiors look different yet feel suspiciously familiar – but created two quite different cars. Where the Kia feels comfortable when you peg your enthusiasm back, the Hyundai is at its best when you’re deliberately over exuberant.

And that’s quite refreshing. Working out whether to buy a Golf GTI or Octavia vRS is considerably more complex than choosing between these two, and we suspect few people will ever be cross shopping cars with such a performance deficit, no matter their occasional similarities.

Point is, the Koreans really have come a long way and in these two cars, and they've done very well indeed. But while the Proceed is a desirable product partly because of the niche it’s explored, the i30N’s a wonderful performance car whose odd shape is probably its least interesting facet. It’s the more scintillating car here by some margin.

Hyundai i30N Fastback

9/10

£29,995
1998cc turbocharged 4cyl, 271bhp, 279lb ft
6spd manual, front-wheel drive
0-62mph in 6.1sec, 155mph
34.0mpg, 188g/km CO2
1429kg

Kia Proceed GT

7/10

£28,135
1598cc turbocharged 4cyl, 201bhp, 195lb ft
7spd DCT, front-wheel drive
0-62mph in 7.2sec, 140mph
39.3mpg, 142g/km CO2
1438kg