Reliable, spacious, and affordable. These are the key ideals that the Hyundai Santa Fe has been designed on. These are also the reasons that this compact SUV has stuck around for so long. The Santa Fe offers everything you would need without the fancy gimmicks. This is for someone who wants to drive their kids to school and to work in the morning. This is a car for a family picnic, not for dune bashing or a day at the track. We highly doubt you would find an SUV in this price range that could top this.
The 2018 Santa Fe as a similar build and design as its predecessor, except with a bit more gravitas. It does feel a lot lighter, but that is just our subjective opinion. The exterior does offer much better aesthetics than last year’s version with its sleeker design reminding you that this is indeed a compact SUV. We were offered the 3.3 L V6 4-wheel drive version for our review, and it more than matched every one of our expectations. The vehicle can be switched between eco and sport mode, which we felt was rather unnecessary for a family vehicle.
The Santa Fe is very spacious for a compact SUV, with ample legroom and a large trunk. The interiors feature a panoramic sunroof, seat warmers, and full leather seats. It hosts a range of safety features such as a blind spot detection system, airbags, and our personal favorite – a 360 degree view of your surroundings. The Santa Fe achieves this by taking visual feed from cameras on all four sides and stitching them up, thereby offering you a drone view of the vehicle from the top. We found this feature particularly useful while parallel parking. Touch screens are attached to the back of the driver and passenger headrests and allows HDMI,USB, and SD inputs, something that would keep the kids entertained during long drives. The interiors are a beauty at night with the underglow lights and the dashboard lights giving off subtle yet enjoyable blue hues, which adds to the comfort of the night drive. The dashboard screen menu is comprehensive, allowing a range of audio inputs as well as helping you monitor the tyre pressure, fuel level, and engine temperature. An additional feature that is available in the GCC version is the QIBLA compass that would be very helpful for Muslim members in the car.
There are a few areas where the Santa Fe could have improved such as the hard door handles which almost gives you a plastic feel. The acceleration in the eco mode is rather slow for an SUV, making it not quite ideal for driving in crowded cities. The sport mode however, makes up for this shortcoming. We spent the entire time driving the car in sport mode and felt quite comfortable with it. Another flaw we did notice was that the car seemed to tremble when other cars passed us on highways. This could be alluded to the fact that the vehicle is rather light for a family SUV.
To conclude, the 2018 Santa Fe offers you everything you will need for a daily drive. It’s not the fanciest SUV in the market, and we’re sure that’s not what the designers were aiming for. It is incredibly spacious, fuel efficient, and it won’t cost you a kidney. The Santa Fe starts at 98000 AED for the basic option version going up to 124000 for the full option version. This is a vehicle that is definitely worth the money.
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Editor : Rohit, Driveaholic
