The front seats are quite comfortable, with good bolstering, and the standard beige cloth is smooth but decidedly un-hip, unlike, say, the material in the Mazda3. There's an especially large dead pedal, although one wonders why, because the Elantra is not meant for hard cornering so the driver's left foot doesn't need the support.
The blue backlighting of the gauges has a youthful spirit, and makes the driver feel like it's a cool car. The arcs of the speedo and tach are a thin blue line, with red needles pointing the way.
The radio control knobs are blessedly simple, like radio knobs used to be. Hooray, we say. But we didn't care for the trim on the dash; imagine a silver plastic golf ball.
In the rear, the 35 inches of leg room is a half-inch more than the Civic and Sentra, and a half-inch less than the Corolla, give or take a tenth. But the Elantra has the most hip room. It also has the largest trunk, by a significant amount.
For carrying cargo, the rear seatbacks fold down to allow a pass-through into the trunk. However, the opening isn't vast like the Nissan Sentra's.
Storage compartments are abundant. There's a neat box inside the top of the dash, and a sunglasses container in the headliner. The fixed door pockets have built-in bottle holders. Below the three climate control knobs there's a small companion to the glovebox, and below that, forward of the shift lever, there's also an open storage area. There are two cupholders behind that, and a double console under the driver's elbow.
Generally, the interior is notably quiet, for a compact car. Then the wind picked up, and as we watched the dust devils ahead of us on the road, we listened to the whooshing against the glass.
