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Meet the 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe.
Now, this isn't the same Santa Fe of last year.
It's actually the replacement for the Santa Fe Sport.
But for 2019, Hyundai has decided to make the Sport, the Santa Fe, and the Santa Fe, the Santa Fe XL.
It's actually a bit more confusing than it should be.
Let's just hop behind the wheel and see how she drives.
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Okay, so aside from a new name, we've also a got a new exterior design.
The new Santa Fe is more upright, as opposed to windswept like the old Santa Fe Sport.
We got a new front-end that is reminescent of the Honda Kona.
Really like what's going on up there with the stacked headlight.
In fact, the lights at the top are not the headlight, those are the daytime running lights.
The actual headlights are in the down below them in the middle.
It's kind of interesting.
But overall, the look is just more SUV like, a little bit more like muscular.
And I particularly like this sort of squared off wheel arches and the flat plan that's sort of around them.
And it sort of emphasizes the verticality.
Now on the inside, we've got a whole new look as well with this really nice beige on black interior we've got in this particular model.
Hyundai's sort of a master of taking really low quality materials and just making a really nice looking cabinet while still maintaining nice touchpoints for The leather steering wheel, the seats and things like that.
And one of my favorite new interior touches is this new glove feeling.
It covers the entire roof and extends all the way down the A, B and C tillers and it just adds a little something special to this otherwise kind of buggy feeling interior.
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Now under the hood, in this model, we've got a two liter turbocharged engine.
That's an upgrade over the standard 2.4 liter non turbo model.
It's gonna be mated with an eight speed automatic transmission.
And in this case make 235 horsepower in about 260 pound feet of torque.
That's a good amount of power and grunt for a car of this size and it makes it feel nice and responsive both on From the highway and around town.
You can get this car in front wheel drive or with an optional [UNKNOWN] wheel drive system that's basically gonna be [UNKNOWN] for most of the time, 50/50 is the best you can do in the [UNKNOWN] split there.
[UNKNOWN] econmy isn't exactly the strongest point here.
You only get around 22 miles per [UNKNOWN] combined with the turbo charge engine and you can step up to around 25 Step down to the 2.4 liter.
That's about middle of the road for this class and not really anything to brag about.
And they said that they've empasized emissions over outright fuel economy and that's why this lighter [UNKNOWN] doesn't get much better fuel economy than last year.
But either way it's gonna be a little bit disappointing when it comes time to get to the pump.
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Now, one area that the Santa Fe has greatly improved is in technology.
For 2019, Hyundai's SmartSense safety suite is standard on the Santa Fe.
Try saying that five times fast.
That means that, even at the SE Trim level, with no option boxes checked, you're gonna get forward collision warning with automatic braking assist and pedestrian detection.
You get rear collision warning when you're reversing with automatic braking.
You get lane-keeping assists, blind spot monitoring that'll actually steer you back into your lane if you try to merge into another car As well as other safety features like adaptive cruise control or [UNKNOWN] traffic.
All of that, no option boxes checked at the base level.
That's pretty interesting.
In fact, the only new safety feature for 2019 that's an option is gonna be a new rear seat occupant protection system.
And what that does is it monitors the rear seat with a ultrasonic sensor for 24 hours after you get out of the car.
So if you leave your dog sleeping back there or, heaven forbid, your baby, and they move around, it'll actually notice that there's somebody back there, beyond just a standard door sensor.
And it will send you a notification via the Blue Link telematic system.
That'll come either as a text message or as a notification in the app or an email.
It'll also honk the horn, so if you're near the car, it'll let you know somebody's back there.
That's a pretty cool feature.
And speaking of blue link, we have got in the dashboard the very simlar entertainment system to [UNKNOWN] it's a big eight inch system.
With Hydunai's blue link entertainment.
It's a really good set up.
Software is pretty much the same.
But that's a good thing because we really like what they have here.
Android Auto and Apple Car Play are still standard.
In fact the only new feature in the dashboard here is this new star button on the entertainment system.
Which allows you to assign Any shortcut to pretty much any part in the Entertainment system to one touch.
So, if you wanna put your home address under there so you won't have to dig in through the Menu, you just tap that button and take you ride home.
Or if you wanna set in to turn on Bluetooth, you can do that as well.
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Overall, what Hyundai has done is created in my opinion, a better looking, but also a much more comfortable Santa Fe Sport with the new 2019 Santa Fe.
The enhancements to the ride quality make this a very comfortable car to drive and the enhancements to the power terrain make it actually pretty fun to drive as well, if not maybe the best when it comes to fuel economy And, of course, they've also got their other strong suits working for them, that ten year 100000 mile warranty and a price that's pretty competitive.
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The 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe starts at $25,500, now that's a little bit more than the outgoing Santa Fe Sport, but you're getting a lot more standard equipment especially that standard safety equipment And Hyundai thinks that's still gonna balance out to a really good value.
However, with all the bells and whistles close to fully loaded, this Santa Fe Ultimate that we have right here is about a $36,000 car.
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