South Korea marque
Hyundai in the UK
Hyundai started selling in Britain in 1982 and spent its first two decades competing on price before its five year warranty and European design work changed how it was seen. The i10 and i20 are the used volume, and the i10 in particular is a mainstay of driving school and first car use. Its warranty is transferable within the five years, which matters when you are looking at a three year old car.
There is no reliability figure for Hyundai as a marque that this site could cite. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates published by companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and variants to count.
Each of those choices moves the answer by several percentage points, and none of them is a measurement a reader could go and check. A number printed beside the Hyundai badge here would be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name.
What is genuinely knowable is one car at a time: its own invoices, its own service record and what the common repairs on that model actually cost when they arrive.
No fault ordering is published for this marque
Model by model
Every Hyundai line we hold a record for
| Model | Years sold in the UK | Body styles | Fuel types | Fuel options |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| i10 | since 2008 | Hatchback | Petrol | 1 |
| i20 | since 2008 | Hatchback | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol mild hybrid | 3 |
| i30 | since 2007 | Hatchback, Estate | Petrol, Diesel | 2 |
| Tucson | 2004 to 2010, then again since 2015 | SUV | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol hybrid, Plug-in hybrid | 4 |
| Kona | since 2017 | SUV | Petrol, Petrol hybrid, Electric | 3 |
| Santa Fe | since 2001 | SUV | Diesel, Petrol hybrid, Plug-in hybrid | 3 |
Before you buy one
What the Hyundai record does and does not settle
There are 6 Hyundai model lines here and the oldest of them went on sale in Britain in 2001. Of those, 6 are still sold new and none have finished. A finished line is not automatically a worse buy, but it fixes the newest example you will ever find and it decides how long the parts supply has had to run.
Between them those models have been sold here with 6 different fuel types: petrol, diesel, petrol mild hybrid, petrol hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric. That spread is the practical reason one figure for the whole marque would be no use to anybody standing on a forecourt. Electric cars lost their road tax exemption on 1 April 2025, so an electric one now pays the same standard rate as a petrol one of the same age. The alternative fuel discount that used to shave a little off hybrids ended on the same date, so hybrid badging no longer changes the bill. Diesels carry a particulate filter, and a car used only for short cold journeys will keep blocking it until the driving pattern changes.
Those lines were bodied 3 ways: hatchback, estate and SUV. The four wheel drive versions carry more driveline than the two wheel drive ones, and driveshaft boots and propshaft joints are all inspected.
Examples across this marque straddle two road tax regimes: CO2 bands for cars first registered between 1 March 2001 and 31 March 2017, and the flat standard rate for anything registered on or after 1 April 2017. That is why the tax figure on each model page names the year and the engine it applies to, and why it is safer to read the V5C than to take a rate from a badge.
What goes wrong on a Hyundai is decided by the individual car and the person who owned it last, not by the marque. Two examples of the same model and year, one serviced on time and one not, are in completely different condition, which is the honest reason a marque average would mislead you even if somebody published one. The invoices for the car in front of you name what was actually replaced, when, and at what mileage. Read those instead.