New Hyundai i30 Tourer starts production

The new Hyundai i30 Tourer (Estate) has gone in to production in the Czech Republic, extending the range of the new i30.

The latest Hyundai i30 is proving to be a proper success story for Hyundai, selling almost 60,000 units in the few months it’s actually been moving out of Hyundai showrooms in Europe.

And now Hyundai look set to increase i30 sales further with the i30 Tourer (that’s ‘Estate’ in English, even if Hyundai PR did manage to refer to it as the i30 Wagon in the Geneva press release to the extent we thought they might launch it as the Hyundai i30 Wagon) starting its production run at Hyundai’s facility in Nošovice in the Czech Republic.

Introduced at the Geneva Motor Show this Spring, the Hyundai i30 Tourer is pretty much what you’d expect – an i30 with a small shed bolted on the back. But it’s a stylish small shed and does, if anything, make the i30 Tourer look even more convincing than the hatch.

Although Hyundai hasn’t seen fit to let us have any photos of the interior of the i30 Tourer it’s not much of an assumption to think the interior will be the same in the Tourer as in the Hatch, which means pretty impressive.

What will change is the load space, with the i30 Tourer offering an extra 150 litres of space with the back seats in place (which is about enough for an extra 2’x2′ box) and a capacious 1642 litres with the seats down – up by 326 litres on the hatch (or enough for an extra two and a bit of the aforementioned boxes).

Engines in the i30 Tourer will be the same selection the i30 Hatch offers – which means three petrol engines and three diesel engines ranging from 90 to 135 ps – at least until Hyundai extract their digit and put something more interesting under the bonnet.

We still don’t have a price for the new Hyundai i30 Tourer, but you won’t be million miles out if you add £1,000 to the Hatch prices – which means a starting price of around £15,500 – when the i30 Tourer arrives in Hyundai UK showrooms later in 2012.