The refreshed Hyundai Grand Starex has finally reached Malaysian shores, and is being offered in a sole Executive trim priced at RM 148,888 on-the-road without insurance. With the facelift, the big MPV adopts a more reserved design instead of the rather bold look of the outgoing model.

This is most apparent at the front, where you’ll find horizontal, trapezoidal-shaped projector headlamps instead of the previous vertical units. The clusters flank the company’s Cascading Grille with horizontal slats, which is no longer designed in a Lexus-esque fashion.


The rear hasn’t changed much, as the taillight clusters are exactly the same shape as before and there’s still a roof spoiler. An omission here are the faux exhaust outlets seen on the Grand Starex Royale, which was launched way back in November 2016.

The dashboard design inside the cabin is exactly the same as before, and not like what you’ll find in Hyundai’s domestic market. A touchscreen head unit resides within a frame on the dash, and is flanked by a pair of air vents. Below it are controls for the single-zone air-conditioning system, which includes controllable rear blowers for all three rows of seats behind the front passengers.

As before, you can swivel the second row seats to face those in the third row if needed, while ingress and egress into the area is done via manually-operated sliding doors. Fabric upholstery comes as standard but you can opt for a leather option as seen here.


The rest of the kit list includes 16-inch alloy wheels with 215/70 profile tyres, front and rear fog lamps, a rear top-mounted monitor display, six speakers, cruise control, rearview camera, automatic lights, parking sensors, four airbags, ESC, BAS, traction control and ABS.

Under the bonnet is a 2.5 litre turbodiesel engine that outputs 170 PS at 3,600 rpm and 441 Nm of torque from 2,000 to 2,250 rpm. A five-speed automatic transmission (with Shiftronic) sends drive to the rear wheels. Each purchase comes with a five-year/300,000 km warranty.