This is certainly a classy SUV — but no one can agree on its looks
I’m not saying that Hyundai’s new Santa Fe is Ryan Reynolds on wheels – but neither is it, as my car-obsessed neighbour put it, ‘a giant, glistening turd’. Just don’t look at it from behind.
Do other animals disagree as widely and violently as Homo sapiens? It certainly sounds like cockatoos are constantly scrapping about something, and cats and pugs are notorious for their pugilism, but I think our inability to find common ground on even the simplest of things – Ryan Reynolds, for example – makes us truly and awfully unique.
Reynolds is without doubt a very handsome man, with a jaw cockatoos could nest under and eyes like liquid amber. He’s so dishy that he even looks good with a silly red rubber mask on, and yet my wife (along with some other strange humans) finds him entirely unattractive. Obviously, her inexplicable taste in men is a gift horse whose mouth I should not be examining, but it does demonstrate how variable our feelings can be when it comes to looks. And this applies to car design, too.
I’m not saying that Hyundai’s new Santa Fe We Photocopied a Land Rover Please Don’t Sue Us (I believe this is the brand’s internal code name for the project) is Ryan Reynolds on wheels – but neither is it, as my car-obsessed neighbour put it, “a giant, glistening turd”.
Other unkind types referred to the hulking Hyundai as horrific and the ugliest car they’d ever seen, some even made retching noises, and yet, because I am blessed enough to call her a colleague, I happened to be picking up the great Nikki Gemmell in it and she thought it was “a lovely Range Rover”.
Personally, I think the new Santa Fe is a polished piece of plagiarism that falls down only if you look at it from directly behind – an angle that makes it look like the back end of a toilet block that has soiled itself.
From every other point of view I think it looks muscular, tough, impressive and almost exactly like a Land Rover (except for the “look, I’m actually a Hyundai” H-shaped light clusters, which are a bit naff). What is undeniable is that it looks about as much like the previous Santa Fe as I look like Deadpool.
I managed to get my aesthetically offended neighbour into the Santa Fe by feeding him a Valium and blindfolding him, and once inside he was almost as shocked as I’d been by how lovely, classy and capacious this very large SUV is inside. I was also struck again by just how flagrant the Land Rover borrowing has been, because even the steering wheel looks like a direct lift from an old Range Rover Sport.
The seats (you can choose to have six or seven) are hugely comfortable, all the screens and multiple wireless phone chargers are impressive, and it feels so posh for a Hyundai that you have to wonder how worrying this must all be for its upmarket sister brand, Genesis.
The Santa Fe’s ride quality is also very close to European in its excellence, the steering is nicely calibrated and yes, you really can feel a “but” coming in this sentence, can’t you? The issue is that big old SUVs like this used to come with V6 petrol engines or diesel ones, but neither of those things are now an option (although making your Santa Fe a 4WD is; you can now buy one that’s front-wheel-drive only). This two-tonne vehicle must instead make do with a 1.6-litre four-cylinder turbocharged engine, a small electric motor and a battery pack, a hybrid set-up that combines to make 172kW and 367Nm.
Fortunately the whole hybrid system is connected to an old-school six-speed gearbox, which provides quite smooth progress most of the time. The switching between electric and petrol power is never jarring, and while it is an excellent example of hybrid technology being able to add torque (some 264Nm from the electric system alone), there’s definitely a sensation that this Santa Fe would be a lot more fun and effortless to drive with a bigger engine. And I felt that without ever having seven people and luggage on board. The pay-off, of course, is that I started the week with a potential range of 1000km from a single tank of fuel, and got reasonably close to the claimed fuel economy of 5.6 litres per 100km.
The biggest shock of all for me, however, was not the British styling or the choice of powertrain, it was the price. This highly classy, high-riding, European-feeling giant SUV can be yours for as little as $55,500 (that’s for the base model with FWD), and even the top Calligraphy variant I drove, which is the one you really want, is just $75,000.
I never like to know what a car costs until I give it back, and after a week together I would not have been alarmed to hear that Hyundai was charging north of $100K for this one – which means that, to my mind at least, this thing feels like an absolute bargain.
I can’t have one, however, because my neighbour would have to move to avoid looking at it, and I quite like him. Although he’s no Ryan Reynolds.
Hyundai Santa Fe HEV
ENGINE: 1.6-litre four-cylinder hybrid (172kW/367Nm)
FUEL ECONOMY: 5.6 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: Six-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
PRICE: $75,000
