Lowering the tailgate comes with a satisfying damping motion, however, and the gate can be dropped with a press on the key fob. Hyundai showed almost comical images of bicycles in the bed with their front wheels draped over the tailgate, seemingly highlighting the bed’s limitations. (4971 mm) in overall length, the Santa Cruz is 4 in. Ford’s Maverick, slated to launch later this year as the first direct competitor to the Santa Cruz, sports a marginally longer bed at 54.4 in. (1323-mm) bed is minimalist by that standard. Because let’s face it, the singular metric of a cargo bed’s usefulness is its length, and the Santa Cruz’s 52.1-in.
It’s too bad Hyundai couldn’t (or wouldn’t) design the Santa Cruz to incorporate the novel extendable bed of the 2015 Santa Cruz concept that slid outward like a filing-cabinet drawer.
Then again, even though it’s based on the unibody architecture of the all-new 2022 Tucson SUV, the Santa Cruz has been engineered to tow as much as 5000 lb (2268 kg), albeit with trailer brakes and a complicated rigging purportedly will allow the stumpy cargo bed to haul standard plywood sheets. But even today’s midsize pickups are large-ish and expensive-ish, leading product-development to the inevitable: compact pickups – or, considering the dimensional bloat of all segments over the past two decades, “smaller-than-midsize” might be a more appropriate description.Īnd even though it took Hyundai an almost inexplicable (well, there is an explanation) six years to get from Santa Cruz concept vehicle to 2022 Santa Cruz production vehicle, the new Santa Cruz is satisfyingly faithful to the concept’s sharky sheetmetal – which is to say, it looks quite contemporary and not pickup-blocky, underscoring Hyundai product planner Melvyn Bautista’s assertion the Santa Cruz is “not intended for traditional pickup owners.” Instead, he said at a media drive near Detroit, Hyundai’s new hybrid body style – the company’s first North America-specific model, by the way – is targeted at crossover-vehicle intenders who would prefer an open bed and don’t have many of the duty-cycle expectations of pickup owners or intenders. When the market got too overheated for only fullsizers to handle, midsize models a few years ago got renewed attention. But there’s no doubt pickups are here to stay and now automakers have set to work filling every size segment with this currently beloved body style.įor decades, the notion of compact pickups has been ignored, largely because most companies’ manufacturing capacity has been directed to fullsize body-on-frame behemoths their correspondingly outsized profits. The Venn diagram of why pickup trucks – particularly fullsizers – succeed in the American consumer psyche surely is a complex and bizarre hodgepodge of reality and perception. The bed is deep, at least, and the lift-in height is a humane 31.6 in.”
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