Hyundai Inster First Drive: Way Better Than It Needs to Be

Great small cars are hard to do. There’s not a lot of room in which to package both powertrain and people. It’s tricky to make them ride well and a challenge to keep road and wind noise to a minimum. And it’s easier to make a big car look good than it is a little one. We’ll cut to the chase: Hyundai’s perky little Inster is a great small car.

“Inster” is the European-market name for the electric-powered version of the cute Hyundai Casper that made its debut in Korea in 2021. The entry-level Inster 01 is powered by a 95-hp, 108-lb-ft electric motor that drives the front wheels and draws electrons from a 42-kWh battery that delivers a WLTP-rated range of 203 miles.

The Inster 02, which costs 14 percent more, gets extra equipment such as heated front seats and 17-inch wheels, along with a 113-hp version of the motor (torque is unchanged at 108 lb-ft) and a 49-kWh battery that boosts the WLTP-rated range to 224 miles. At the top of the range sits the Inster Cross, which gets different 17-inch wheels, roof rails, and SUV-style cladding on the front and rear fascias, above the wheels, and along the sills.

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How Hyundai Made Four Adults Fit Comfortably

At 150.6 inches long overall, the Inster would just about fit between the axles of an average American full-size crew cab pickup. Yep, it’s tiny. But this electric car will easily accommodate four 6-foot-plus adults. You read that right: four 6-foot-plus adults. Like all great small cars, from the original 1959 Mini to the Fiat Panda, the Hyundai Inster is brilliantly packaged, a car whose funky and well-equipped interior seems to defy its external dimensions.

The secret sauce is the tall roof; at 62.0 inches, it’s just 0.4 inch shy of a base Hyundai Kona in terms of overall height, and its lower ground clearance means the Inster’s interior may be taller. This allows four upright seats to be located within a 101.6-inch wheelbase. In the Inster 02 and Cross models, each squab of the 50:50 split rear seat can be slid forward and backward 6.3 inches, and each backrest can be tilted. With the rear seat in its rearmost position, a 6-foot-plus passenger can sit behind a 6-foot-plus driver with almost 2 inches of kneeroom and surplus head clearance. Rear loadspace ranges from 9.9 to 12.4 cubic feet with the rear seat up, to a maximum of 37.4 cubes with the seat folded flat.

Equipment levels are high. Even the base Inster 01 comes standard with a 10.3-inch infotainment touchscreen, air conditioning, cruise control, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration, 64-color ambient lighting, and the full suite of driver assist safety systems including lane keep assist, intelligent speed limit assist, and forward collision avoidance assist. The high-definition screen in front of the driver features Hyundai’s typically well-rendered graphics, the display changing to reflect the selected drive mode. What’s more, with physical buttons on the steering wheel and close at hand at the center of the dash, the Inster’s interior doesn’t look or feel or function like you’re driving a budget car.

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More Than a City Car: Surprisingly Fun to Drive

So much for the practicalities. What’s the Inster like to drive? In short, like all great small cars, it’s surprisingly fun. The Casper is powered by a 75-hp naturally aspirated or 99-hp turbocharged 1.0-liter internal combustion engine. The Inster’s electric powertrains deliver more muscle when you punch the accelerator. The base Inster 01 will get from 0 to 60 mph in about 11.5 seconds, while the more powerful Inster 02 is 1.1 seconds quicker. No, neither Inster is as quick as the Honda e we drove back in 2020 (though both offer 63 percent more range, and their battery packs only need 30 minutes to get from a 10 percent state of charge to 80 percent), but the characteristic instant-on torque of an e-motor means the little Hyundai still feels alert in the traffic.

And it feels quick on country two-lanes, happily bowling along at 80 mph with little effort. That’s because, like all Hyundai EVs, the Inster offers five different levels of lift-off regen, all quickly accessible by way of the steering-wheel-mounted paddles. Selecting Coast mode, which produces zero regen when you come off the pedal, unlocks that free-flowing pace on country roads or the freeway. In town you can flick to the other end of the regen range to access one-pedal driving. Four drive modes are available—Normal, Sport, Snow, and Eco—though, annoyingly, you must repeatedly press the button under the left-hand spoke of the steering wheel to cycle through each mode to get the one you want.

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The steering is light but accurate. Sport mode ups the effort needed on the steering wheel, but not annoyingly so. Brake feel is good, with no discernible handoff between regenerative and mechanical braking. Batteries are heavy—the Inster weighs 650 to 770 pounds more than the gas-powered Casper—but the extra mass is all under the floor, which helps lower the center of gravity, and it acts as a damper on the small, sharp impacts that often unsettle small cars, despite the relatively taut suspension. Wind and road noise are commendably low, even at 70 mph.

The Giant-Killer Spirit of a Modern Mini

Although it’s designed as a car for European and Asian cities with crowded, narrow streets, the Inster has some of that endearing giant-killer character of the original Mini in the way it can scamper down a winding back road when driven with intent, startling drivers of larger, less wieldy hatchbacks and SUVs. It feels more sophisticated to drive than its size and price suggest. It would likely sticker from $24,000 to $29,000 in the U.S., based on U.K. pricing vis-à-vis other Hyundai models.

Little more than a speed bump to a Ford Super Duty, the Hyundai Inster is way too small to ever be seen in America, of course. But it reveals the breadth of the capability of today’s Hyundai Motor Group, a company that is not only building a Ferrari-fighting mid-engine supercar for its Genesis luxury brand but has already built something that is arguably much more difficult to get right, a great small car.