2013 Hyundai Elantra GT: Family Checklist

After my weeklong test drive of Hyundai's brand-new 2013 Elantra GT hatchback, my school-age kids were complaining about the backseat legroom and wishing I had a "different kind of job."

Whenever my family of four was in the compact Elantra GT for long stretches of time or lots of errand running, it felt smaller and smaller as time passed. While I liked the passenger room, my 8- and 10-year-old kids weren't sold on it. I had to keep moving the front passenger seat forward whenever my husband wasn't in it to make sure my son had enough legroom in the rear seat.

What's the Most Affordable Compact Sedan?

Car shoppers want a long list of features in a new car, even if that car is a compact sedan that starts around $16,000. That starting price usually doesn't include what many consider "must-have" features — chief among them an automatic transmission.

We took 11 compact sedans and looked at their prices when equipped with the following features:

• Automatic transmission
• Cruise control
• USB input
• Remote entry
• Tilt/telescoping steering wheel
• Steering-wheel audio controls

It may seem like a simple search, but if you're looking at a new Nissan Sentra, Dodge Dart or Volkswagen Jetta, you'll need to know the specific trim level, options and option packages to ensure you won't regret not having that one missing feature.

We took those as-equipped prices and then added five years of fuel costs to come up with the most affordable compact sedan on the market.

Having recently purchased our long-term Honda Civic that has all of these features in a base model, we thought it had a good shot of scoring well here. But the results were somewhat surprising, especially in terms of what car was No. 1.

Top 10 Best-Selling Cars: April 2013

Nissan and Ford led a strong month for the auto industry, with sales up 23.2% at Nissan and 17.9% at Ford thanks to big gains among both carmakers' strongest sellers. Nissan Altima sales gained 35.4% while Ford Escape sales spiked 52% — despite similar year-over-year incentives on both and lower dealership supply for the Escape.

It may seem bizarre that the Altima, then, isn't among the top 10 best-sellers. It's been there for ninth months straight, and in March it was the best-selling car (not truck) in America. But a year ago, sales were dismal — less than 17,000 in April 2012 — so even a healthy spike kept Nissan off April 2013's top 10.

The Toyota Camry and Honda Accord had higher-profile struggles. The Camry's sales drop could signal plateauing demand for Toyota's seventh-generation family sedan, whose year-over-year sales have declined for three straight months. The new Accord, meanwhile, is just 7 months old, and shoppers found significantly lower discounts versus the 2012 Accord a year ago. It's a factor that could affect Accord sales through autumn. Still, Ford didn't seem to have a problem with that. Anyone considering the new Fusion found a similar situation — lower discounts versus year-ago levels — but it didn't stop shoppers from flocking toward the popular sedan, whose sales boomed 23.7%.

Recall Alert: 2011-13 Hyundai Elantra

Hyundai is recalling 186,254 model-year 2011-13 Elantra sedans due to a problem with the air bags that could cause an injury, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The affected sedans were manufactured from Nov. 12, 2010, through March 5, 2013. A support bracket attached to the headliner could become displaced during a side curtain airbag deployment. If the headliner support bracket makes contact with an occupant during a crash, it could cut them.

In a statement to Cars.com, the automaker said it was aware of one minor injury resulting from the problem. A motorist suffered a cut to his ear during a significant collision in a 2011 Elantra that caused the side curtain airbag to deploy.

Affordable Sedans Add High-End Features to Backseats

Nothing makes a person feel neglected like sitting in the backseat. Unless you are being driven by a chauffeur, most rear passengers in a sedan feel more like second-class citizens. Until now.

A recent automotive trend has my kids jumping for joy: seat heaters for rear passengers. This feature seems to be an indicator that things are movin' on up for those in the back. What's even better is this feature, once common only in luxury cars, is now available in cars that cost less than a bazillion dollars.

Why the Dodge Dart Has a Long Way to Go

Dodge sold just 7,154 Dart sedans in January — better than December 2012, but a shabby performance when you consider that Honda moved 21,881 Civics, Ford sold 16,161 Focuses and Toyota moved 23,822 Corollas and Matrixes. Dodge dealers opened January with a glut of Darts — 141 days' worth, to be exact. That's more than double the days' supply for the Chevrolet Cruze and more than triple the supply of the Civic and Focus.

January marks the seventh full month of Dart sales, and it's been a slow start for the compact sedan. The Wall Street Journal reports Dodge parent Chrysler cut a factory shift at its facility in Dundee, Mich., which makes one of the Dart's engines, due to slow sales. At January's North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Chrysler-Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne admitted that the Dart's dual-clutch automatic transmission and high mix of stick-shift cars at launch reflected "powertrain solutions that, in today's world and in hindsight, were not and are not the ideal solution."

The drivetrains don't help, but there may be another factor in play: Dodge's compact sedan is only that — a sedan. Compact cars offer the most diverse body styles. The Corolla has a Matrix offshoot, the Civic comes as a sedan or coupe, the Focus and Mazda3 include a hatchback and sedan, and the Hyundai Elantra scores a trifecta: sedan, coupe and hatch.

Black Friday: Best Cars for Serious Shoppers

A successful Black Friday shopping trip is all in the planning. Bargain hunters study store ads and websites as though they're cramming for a test, and now they have less time to do so as several major chains — Sears, Wal-Mart, Target and Toys R Us — will open their doors on Thanksgiving evening instead of 4 or 5 a.m. the Friday after Thanksgiving.

There's one thing that Black Friday shoppers can plan before the deal-laden store circulars arrive: which car to take.

Black Friday shoppers might think bigger is better — big SUVs, minivans — when it comes to picking a car for hauling all their bargains. They're not wrong, especially if they're hoping to bag a gigantic flat-screen TV at a low price. But nimble, small cars in busy parking lots shouldn't be left out of the Black Friday fun. Here are our top picks for Black Friday haulers.

Hyundai, Kia Mileage Mishap: How It Happened

How did Hyundai-Kia get its estimated mileage ratings so wrong that it had to offer reimbursement to some 900,000 owners? The truth is complicated, and it gets to the complexities of EPA testing.

Hyundai-Kia's Sung Hwan Cho told reporters this morning that it's "a very complex testing process." Cho heads the automaker's U.S. technical centers. He shed some light on the EPA tests, which lead to the city and highway fuel-economy figures on a new-car window sticker. A key part of the tests involve measuring the resistance of various systems, dubbed the "road load" by engineers: how a car's tires meet the pavement, how the vehicle's shape cuts through the air and how the drivetrain's moving parts work in tandem. Each area translates to fuel efficiency, or lack thereof.

"There are hundreds of different parameters that can affect this road load," Cho said. "Ambient temperature, wind speeds, atmospheric pressure."

Then there's a litany of variations within each test vehicle — how many miles are on it, the condition of the drivetrain, the tire wear. Finally, the test procedures themselves involve "which kind of regulation and guidance procedures you follow, and how you process the data, and how you calibrate your measurements," he said.

Somewhere in those variations, Hyundai-Kia went askew of EPA guidance. But exactly how much guidance exists is up in the air.

What to Do If You Own an Affected Hyundai, Kia

We reported this morning that Hyundai and Kia are revising gas mileage ratings for nearly 900,000 vehicles from the 2011 through 2013 model years — about a third of the cars sold by the affiliated Korean automakers over that range. 

What does it mean to you if you own one of the affected cars? We just got off the line with Hyundai and Kia officials, and here are some answers:

Cars.com's Mileage Tests of Hyundai and Kia Vehicles In Line With EPA Results

In the wake of today's news that Hyundai and Kia will reimburse owners for bad mileage estimates, we've compiled the results of our mileage tests from Shootouts and other challenges we've conducted over the past few years that involved the affected cars and SUVs.

In September 2011, we took the previously 40-mpg-rated Hyundai Elantra and pitted it against special "fuel-saving" trims from the competition designed to eke out a few mpgs more to hit that vaunted 40 mpg highway figure. The Elantra's new highway rating is 38 mpg, and its combined rating dropped to 32 mpg from 33.

Our results put the Hyundai in last place.