Hyundai Santa Fe

On the inside, the Hyundai Santa Fe has got an all-new interior design theme, which makes it a much more luxurious place to be in. The wraparound theme for the dashboard makes it look wide and premium, despite having a minimalist theme for the rest of the cabin.

The driver’s cockpit of the Hyundai Santa Fe looks futuristic with a coloured supervision cluster, which along with the three-spoke multi-functional steering wheel looks nice. The centre console gets a free mounted touchscreen infotainment system shared with the Tucson, with geometrically designed AC vents placed just below it. The panel for the automatic climate control too looks nice with its fairly large size, with a wide layout for the transmission tunnel complementing it. 

The seven-seater cabin of the Hyundai Santa Fe might not have a too spacious third row of seats, but the rest of the cabin is fairly spacious. The elongated list of features including heads up display, panoramic sunroof, powered, heated, and ventilated front seats, and electric parking brake do make things quite easy.

The latest iteration of Hyundai Santa Fe looks smashing with an all-new design language, which offers a very distinctive visual appeal, making it a strong head turner. The aggressive and very busy design language might not appeal to some at first, but then, it surely grows on you.

The frontal look of the Hyundai Santa Fe has the manufacturer’s latest split headlamp design theme, which is a combination of a sleek triangular daytime running LED assembly at the top and pentagonal shaped main headlamp assembly below it on the front bumper. The SUV gets a cascading front grille, which features a honeycomb mesh pattern and has an upper silver garnish, the side extensions of which flow till below the upper partition of daytime running LED. The tiny fog lamps are placed just at the bottom verge of the front bumper.

Hyundai has chosen to make the Santa Fe slightly more rounded in profile when viewed from the sides. The curved shoulder line and roofline, the strong character line flowing sideways through the door handles, door-mounted rearview mirrors, slightly squared wheel arches, and sleek roof rails combine to give the Santa Fe an athletic stance. 

The Hyundai Santa Fe has got a pair of angular LED tail lamps that have a curved design for their outer extensions. A sleek chrome garnish runs between the tail lamps, with the SUV getting a heavy cladding adorned rear bumper at the bottom. While the upper edges of the cladding get turn indicators, the SUV gets twin exhaust pipes. 

While all the previous generations of Hyundai Santa Fe lacked the rigidity and sturdiness of its ladder on frame rivals with a soft setup, things have improved much on this all-new iteration. The Macpherson struts at the front and multi-link at the rear still have got a soft setup, but it is not as bouncy as the previous models.

The only engine and gearbox combination being offered in the Singapore spec Hyundai Santa Fe is a 2.4-litre four-cylinder petrol engine with a 6-speed automatic gearbox. The engine is decently powerful with a sufficient amount of performance on tap – 184 PS of power and 238 Nm of torque.

The Hyundai Santa Fe has been bestowed with a long list of safety amenities, consisting of front, side, and curtain airbags, ABS with EBD and brake assist, cruise control, lane-keeping assist, blind-spot collision warning, rear cross-traffic alert, forward collision assist, surround-view monitor, rearview camera, front and rear parking sensors, and safe exit assist.

With a huge number of changes and additions, the Hyundai Santa Fe now feels right at the top of the game, with an unmistakable road presence, oodles of premium appeal, and rightly tuned mechanicals.