Ever since the Azera was first launched in 2006, I’ve been itching to get behind the wheel of one, but you know how things go, there’s always something else to do.

Of course, I’ve had opportunities to drive it at various events, but I thought that in order to give it a fair evaluation, I’d wait until I could book one for a whole week! After all, as I see it, the Azera was the model which first heralded in the idea of luxury products from Hyundai. That’s something quite rare in the car business these days, a company moving its product line upscale!

Oh yes, it’s easy enough for manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW to start offering cheaper models, but to head in the other direction takes some doing. Just ask any product branding specialist.

As most of you know, Hyundai started out in North America by offering budget priced vehicles, such as the famous Hyundai Pony. In my opinion, that’s a vehicle which has been unfairly treated, the brunt of many cruel jokes it didn’t deserve, and it’s now something which Hyundai seems to want to push back in the history books as far as possible.

However, if you talk to people who actually owned one, they’ll paint an entirely different picture. Ok, the Pony was rather crudely built and didn’t offer much in the way of creature comforts, let alone luxury, but it was priced right and many owners piled hundreds of thousands of miles on them. They also sold in large numbers and outlasted many of its competitors’ products

In a lot of ways, the Pony reminds me of that other great people’s car, the original Volkswagen Bug, because that little car had it fair share of problems also, but owners simply adored them!

Now there’s a perfect comparison company for Hyundai, as VW also started out building cars for the masses and then slowly moved more upscale until it finally created the VW Phaeton. What a car! In fact, although VW struggled to sell them in any kind of numbers, it did prove that it could produce one of the world’s finest luxury automobiles, if it wanted to. Today, that vehicle is the basic underpinnings of the Audi A8, and even one or two Bentleys.

Back to the Azera, and I think that Hyundai made a very smart move launching its upscale attack with this vehicle because it almost perfectly blends affordability with more than a touch of luxury.

From the outside, nice chrome appointments hint of what can be expected inside. The styling is bang up to date (especially when it was launched in 06), and the fit and finish of the body panels are on par with anything that the Japanese competition can offer (and this comes from someone who once ran detail shops for a living!).

However, it is the interior which truly impressed me. As soon as you step inside the vehicle, you realize that it’s more than a simple step up from the other Hyundai products. To call it loaded wouldn’t do it justice. It literally carries more bells and whistles than some other vehicles twice its price, and although affordability has always been a keyword at Hyundai, the Azera takes this to a new level entirely.

Hyundai is also a company which learns quickly, and a good example of that is the fact that the Azera sports a nice soft-touch dashboard whilst some of its competition is still utilizing hard plastics.