The 2012 Hyundai Sonata's Manual Transmission Was Hot Garbage

It’s probably not accurate to describe my family as car enthusiasts, but over the years, we’ve generally driven interesting cars. Both my parents can drive stick and started teaching me as soon as I got my license. I learned my love of the manual transmission from them and currently own a six-speed E39 540i that I plan to keep forever. And yet, thanks to my dad, I learned to hate one very specific manual car: his 2012 Hyundai Sonata. It’s been my mortal enemy for years, and I finally need to write about it in hopes of achieving some level of catharsis.

Behold the Splendor of the Hyundai Grandeur

You see, my dad is your stereotypical lifelong Clark Howard listener. He knows how to get a deal on anything and will go out of his way to save money pretty much any way he can. It’s an admirable trait that served our family well over the years. And a little over a decade ago, he found a deal that he couldn’t pass up.

For some reason, no one in the Atlanta area wanted to buy a silver 2012 Hyundai Sonata with a manual transmission. And the longer it sat on the dealer’s lot, the lower the price dropped. Eventually, it got too low for him to resist the temptation any longer, and he pulled the trigger. He was now the new owner of a brand-new midsize family sedan with an incredibly rare manual transmission.

That should have been cool, right? Most people don’t even know that the sixth-generation Sonata came with a manual, but he had one of the few. Even other automotive journalists that I’ve talked to didn’t remember that there was a six-speed stick shift option on that car. If there are more than a dozen currently for sale in the entire country I’d be surprised.

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And yet, when I came back to visit from college, I quickly realized there was a reason the three-pedal Sonata was so rare: it was terrible. My first car was a manual Kia Spectra that wasn’t exactly fun but was at least easy to drive. The Sonata, on the other hand, was hot garbage. The shifter itself wasn’t truly terrible by economy car standards, but the clutch was basically a way too heavy on-off switch, and I swear the engine just didn’t want to rev.

An entire family of manual transmission lovers struggled to drive that car like we were learning to drive stick for the first time. And not just early on. For years. I didn’t stall the 1946 Volkswagen Beetle that I drove a few years back without stalling it, but a far-newer Hyundai somehow had me looking like an amateur. The only way to drive that car is like you’re trying to break it.

And if it did break, I can’t imagine my dad would be upset. He’s been ready to be done with it for years. But since Hyundai gave him a new engine for free a little while back, why would he get rid of it? Just because the transmission is trash? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a car with a basically brand-new engine.

It can be so easy to fall into the enthusiast trap and parrot the line about the manual always being better. And in a lot of cases, you’d be right. But I guarantee you, no matter how much of a manual transmission evangelist you claim to be, after 15 minutes behind the wheel, you’d also wish my dad had just gotten the automatic, too. Sometimes, the manual version is just bad, and that’s OK. We can admit that without losing our enthusiast cards.

Maybe my dad will just get lucky, and someone will steal it? Just kidding. Even if they did, I’m sure they’d probably return it.