Owning the Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid: One-Year Review

We got this Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid almost exactly a year ago, and in the past 12 months, it's done it all. It's been a road tripper, daily commuter, family hauler, and everything in between, just like every other car, truck, and SUV in the Edmunds' year-long road test fleet. And after 20,000 miles of hard use and cycling through many hands on our staff, we've learned more about what it's like to live with this three-row SUV than you could get in any short loan or especially a couple of hours at the dealership, including one big disappointment. So stick with us. We'll tell you the good, the bad, the broken, and what it's worth today. We're Edmunds, and we test hundreds of cars each year on the road and at our private track, so you get the most trusted reviews. If you want to know which car, truck, or SUV is the best, then stick with us. All right, let's start with the good. Look! Three Bryans! One thing that almost everyone commented on was just how roomy it is inside of the Santa Fe. Now, most smaller three-row SUVs like this, the third row, it really suffers, and it's meant more for school carpool duty, and for adults, it's definitely a brake, glass, and emergency type situation. Not the case here. I took six friends on a trip to Las Vegas in the Hyundai Santa Fe. We put the smaller people in the back, except for me, of course. Surprisingly, the third row was pretty easy to access. However, getting out of it was a bit tricky, but I'm going to chalk that up to us getting older. Another staffer even fit six adults and two dogs inside of this thing for a road trip, and that's normally something we would recommend the larger Hyundai Palisade for, but if you were to measure from the dashboard to the tailgate, the Santa Fe, it's actually larger. Now, how does it do with kids? The Santa Fe is way bigger inside than I was expecting. My five-year-old has this habit of sticking his feet up on the seat back of the passenger side seat in front of him, but in the Santa Fe, I can actually get him far enough away from the front seat that he can't do that and still have room for an adult to sit up in that passenger seat. And if you happen to be sitting in front of Will's kid, something that I've made a mental note to avoid at all costs, there's plenty to like up there as well. One thing I really like about the Santa Fe is the interior. The seats are super comfortable, and the materials all throughout the cabin feel like they're cut above and just feel like they're screwed together really well. One thing of note, though, was the heated seats. The heated seats and the heated steering wheel both get really hot really fast. We also came to appreciate the significant amount of small item storage you're getting in the stylish Santa Fe. Starting over here in front of the passenger, you actually get this bin right here, which shoots UV rays at your phone to disinfect it, another storage shelf, and below here, a large bin that can fit bigger items. Up here, you're also going to get two really large cup holders that can fit big water bottles, and though this center bin doesn't look like it's all that big, as you can tell, you can just keep taking more and more stuff out. I feel like Mary Poppins, or for you younger kids out there, I guess something more like Hermione Granger. Now, this bin also has a very cool party trick because if you're sitting in the second row, you also have access to this because it can open this way, and down below here, there's another way to access that storage area via a pullout bin. Just tons and tons of space up here for all of your small items. Several staff members also had very specific praise for a feature that we don't call out very often in these reviews, and that would be the wireless charging pad, or should I say pads, because here in this loaded calligraphy model, we've got two pads for our two phones. This also has a very nice grippy rubber surface so your phones won't slide around, and on top of that, they split 15 watts of power, which means they charge faster than in most other vehicles. Generally speaking, tech has been a strong point. One standout feature for me was the wireless car play setup. It was super helpful since you can run two phones at the same time, since my wife was the designated DJ and I was running navigation for my phone. Overall, it helped make the trip run very smoothly. Almost as important as having the right DJ are driver assistance features, and thankfully, Hyundai includes a ton of them standard, and we made very good use of them. The active safety features here are impressive. It actually feels like a half step towards full autonomy. Lane centering is confident, but it doesn't fight you when you want to take over, and I like that the driver attention monitoring isn't too sensitive, especially when I'm just letting the adaptive cruise creep along in traffic. The Santa Fe is also pretty great from behind the wheel. I took this thing on a road trip back in May to Las Vegas for my birthday. We fit five guys in here, all of the gear, no problem, plenty of power, and felt very confident on the road. I drove a long-term Santa Fe to Yosemite, about 600 miles there and back with my family. We loved the ride. The suspension felt soft and comfortable, but it was very controlled through the winding roads and the many surfaces that we traversed. When we were on our Lake Tahoe trip, the Santa Fe handled snowy conditions like a champ. I was able to stay confident even when the road conditions got tough. This thing is comfortable, spacious, has a great interior, and it's pretty good from behind the wheel. Why wouldn't you want to buy one? Well, our car is a Santa Fe hybrid, emphasis on hybrid, and when we got it, we were very excited because who wouldn't want a midsize SUV that actually gets better fuel economy than a small crossover? However, it quickly became apparent that that was not going to be the case. Over 20,000 miles and with many different drivers in many different environments, we never really got close to hitting this vehicle's EPA estimated 34 combined mpg, and people, they noticed. So I took this thing to Las Vegas, set the cruise control at 75 miles an hour, and headed to the desert on a four hour journey. But when I got to my destination, I was shocked at how low the mileage readout was. It only said 23 miles per gallon. That's crazy. I mean, I can understand that from a larger three-row SUV, but a small hybrid like the Santa Fe, that is just unacceptable. Wow. It seems like our staff really likes Las Vegas. Now, that might be kind of an extreme example because you are driving through the desert at elevation with the AC running the whole time. However, if you look at our big fuel economy spreadsheet that we keep for all of our year-long test vehicles, we rarely got over 30 mpg on a single tank, and even that is still well short of the 34 mpg we were expecting. Now, if we look at our fuel economy over the whole time that we've had the Santa Fe, it's actually pretty good for a midsize SUV that can seat six. But ultimately, the hybrid, it wasn't able to achieve what it said on the window sticker, and in that sense, it's a disappointment. Now, if fuel economy is your primary concern, then you could go for the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, which does get better mpg. However, we still think that the Santa Fe is the better vehicle. And this interior, as much as we do like it, there are still a few things we would change. You know, as far as touch-sensitive controls are concerned, the ones in the Santa Fe really aren't that bad. They don't get washed out in the sunlight, so you can actually see them during the day. But I would still just rather have regular buttons, especially because the Santa Fe has an annoying piano black finish to the console, so it just all gets covered in fingerprint smudges. And sitting back here, it is plenty roomy. These seats are comfortable, not to mention heated, but, uh... It's cool to have a rear sunroof in the Santa Fe. I mean, that's kind of a premium-feeling feature for your backseat passengers, but I swear there is no heat insulation on the thing. When it is hot and sunny here in LA, that glass gets super hot. Feels like it's baking your head. Speaking of hot, remember these wireless charging pads? Well, phones have a tendency to get hot anyway when they're on the pad, and because these are exposed, they can end up in direct sunlight, and then they become really, really hot. In one instance, one of our staffers had to take their phone off of the charger because it got so hot that it stopped functioning. Buyers might also find the shifter to be a little bit weird as well because it's mounted here on the steering column rather than in the center area like you're going to find in most other cars. I wasn't a big fan of the gear selector for the Santa Fe. It's this big knob that kind of hangs down underneath the steering wheel, and a lot of times when I was getting in and out of the car or even just changing my position around, I'd bump it with my knee. One time I even accidentally shifted it into neutral. If I was the owner, yeah, probably I would get used to that, but I still feel like this is an area where there's some room for improvement. While we're back behind the wheel, there were a couple of other notes that we need to address. This Santa Fe is a calligraphy trim. It is the top trim level, and it comes with a feature called Highway Drive Assist 2, and what that means is that when you're using the adaptive cruise control on the highway, it can actually change lanes for you. So all you have to do is bump the stock like this, and it will check your blind spots and then execute a lane change for you. Now this system, it behaves pretty well, but it is a little bit conservative, so if there are any cars around you, it won't do it, and it's also a bit slow in its operation, so most of the time we found we would just change lanes on our own the old-fashioned way. Now the next nitpick, I'd call that more of a personal issue. One of my pet peeves in cars these days is how much they beep at you if you interrupt the driver attention monitor's line of sight to your eyes. Not every car does this. The Santa Fe absolutely does. If your wrist crosses in front of that line of sight and it's long enough that it decides it doesn't like it, it's going to beep at you. Happens a ton. It's really annoying. And there's just one more problem that several drivers commented on, but it's not a problem for Hyundais or even a problem for most Santa Fe's. It was an issue though, nonetheless. So our Santa Fe is painted in earth brass matte, which looks great when it's clean. Problem is, that finish can't go through an automated car wash. It's hand wash only. The car even came with a special car wash kit. When there's a spot of bird poo or you accidentally parked under a tree and your car's looking all nasty, you want a car that you can drive through a quick gas station car wash. Now if that's going to bother you, that's an easy problem to solve for. Just get a different color. Now if it seems like we've been nitpicking the Santa Fe a bit, it's because we have. Overall, this is still a really great vehicle and a compelling package. And when it went through the Edmunds rating process, it came out with an 8.2 and that puts it in fifth place among all other hybrid SUVs. So what went wrong in our time with the Santa Fe? Honestly, not really much at all. It had a routine tire rotation and an oil change that cost about 165 bucks, which is about standard. Now for what it's worth, the Toyota Highlander Hybrid comes with two years of free maintenance, but the Hyundai has a much better basic and powertrain warranty, so it all kind of evens out in the end. The only real drama occurred when this thing was on the highway and a piece of debris got kicked up into it by the car in front and it put a big crack in the front bumper, but we took it to the body shop and it got fixed straight away. This fancy paint wasn't an issue. And now it's time to talk money. Our fully loaded Santa Fe hybrid calligraphy with all wheel drive in this fancy paint job, it costs just over 50,000 dollars. And while that might sound like a lot of money, if you start to take a look around at some of the Hyundai's competitors, its value proposition actually gets stronger and stronger. An equivalent Toyota Highlander Hybrid with about the same equipment, it'll cost you four grand more, and I would say that the Toyota lacks a lot of the interior refinement and stylishness that we like so much about the Hyundai. When you keep in mind that this is a three row SUV and you remember the level of features, comfort and rock solid build quality that you're getting, this is one of the few vehicles that has come through our garage and I've been like, yeah, that price, it seems fair. And today, in great condition with about 20,000 miles on the odometer, we got an offer from a dealer for this vehicle at 36,000 dollars. Now, our Santa Fe has a lot of miles on it, but even so, 30 percent depreciation in just one year seems pretty high. So I went to our data team to see how that compared to the Highlander, and the results were definitive. We found that for trade ins that were a year old with an average of around 13,000 miles on the odometer, the Santa Fe still lost 26 percent of its value. But the Highlander did significantly better, only losing 13 percent. And that's a big, big feather in the cap of the Toyota. Oh, and if you're curious about what your car is worth, you can head over to Edmunds dot com slash sell my car where you'll get an instant cash offer. The Hyundai Santa Fe. This thing is stylish, comfortable, easy to drive. And sure, it wasn't quite as efficient as we hoped. And there were a few things on the interior that did annoy us. But at the end of the day, this is a well-priced, well-rounded SUV that despite its low gas mileage, I still think it's a very comfortable, spacious three row SUV. That's actually really fun and easy to drive. Would I recommend the Santa Fe? Absolutely. In a second. Would I recommend the Santa Fe? Yes. Yeah, of course. Definitely. A thousand percent. Yes. Yeah, I absolutely would. As for me, I am going to be very sad to see the Santa Fe go. I personally put about 2000 miles on this vehicle myself, and that's because if I ever had to drive any more than four people, this is the first thing that I checked for to see if it was free. I think it's fantastic value. I think it looks great with its And yeah, if I could buy this thing off of our company, I really would consider it. Before we wrap up, please toss us a like and subscribe if you found this video to be valuable because they go a long way towards helping us make more of them. So what do you think about the Santa Fe? Would it fit your lifestyle? Are you a matte paint aficionado now? And do you also love white interiors that actually last? Let us know in the comments below, because for better or worse, we read them all. Thanks for watching.