2014 Hyundai Elantra Pricing, Options and Specifications

Sounds like I should probably avoid experiencing more cars, if the result were to make me so particular I can't live with a urethane wheel. Making myself demand ever more creature comforts runs contrary to several dimensions of my belief system. I'm sure leather feels nicer, but that doesn't mean I have to have it. I'm sure a glass of Château Lafite Rothschild would be spectacular, and even "preferred" (to use your wording) to the $5-8 wines I'm normally satisfied with, but even more important is knowing that I don't "need" to drink the Lafite to be satisfied.

And BTW, compared to a lot of people, I do drive quite a few different cars, because I rent fairly often and have a Zipcar membership. But they're all economy cars: Corollas (will be in one this weekend, BTW), Civics, Mazda3s, Souls, Insights, Versas, Foci, Sonics. The Prius is proably the most expensive car I've ever driven more than once, and I'm not sure I have ever driven a vehicle with a leather steering wheel. Compared to the 1970s hard-plastic steering wheels I learned to drive on, urethane is quite enough luxurious for me. "Preferred" is a very, very long way from "need."

 

Fred Flintstone's vehicle probably had a wooden wheel covered in dinosaur hide. Thanks to the wonders of 20th-century chemistry, we escaped from leather's weaknesses many decades ago. Now the fashionable people "prefer" reverting to leather?

The first car I bought, a Subaru, had the hard, slick, skinny kind of plastic wheel surface (which I covered with a lace-on padded cover, after discovering wrapping it with electrical tape was a very bad idea). So did all my parents' cars and trucks before it. My Mazda has "soft-touch" polyurethane, although lower trim levels of the same model still had the hard slick stuff.