A good friend of mine used to work at TRW as a mechanical engineer. He told me that Hyundai/Kia contracts appeared often to be a cloned spec of a part they might manufacture for another make, and said that their quality and tolerance specifications were very high. What he questioned was that there didn’t seem to be as much care into the integration of all of those parts with each other. It appeared as if they studied other existing designs and combined them, but without the art/experience/knowledge base of a long-standing designer which knew how to integrate them all optimally.
as a volunteer at a couple of local churches, I get to see how they age, along with other makes and models. I’m continually impressed by how the interiors hold up, and at least some of them feel like quite good, heavy, solid vehicles. We’ve got one person who has work done at both churches, and while it always has something else wrong with it, it drives like an old Benz and gets my respect.... but working on it is a headache. Where they can have issues is poor wrench angles, hours of labor to get a plug coil or other $20 sensor, and a plethora of nuisance repairs at 150k. They haven’t reached a point where their engineering looks at maintainability.
even the 3 cyl econoboxes they made 15 years ago seemed respectable, BUT I also personally know of 3 people up to about 5 years ago who had complete engine failures before 100k, randomly, out of the blue. The local dealer was anything but helpful. It probably takes a while to build corporate design intelligence.... especially to keep up with Honda and Toyota.
ive always felt like their interior NVH tuning was quite good, even if I’ve been shy of ever buying one.